In Defense of Gossip

A few months ago, my best friend K was considering whether she should gossip less. K is one of my favorite people to gossip with (she calls her diary a “gossip CRM” and is the first to know the latest tea).

I’ve always felt we should just accept that everyone gossips. That joke “your secret is safe with me and my best friend.”

I don’t even consider gossip bad. This is at odds with the majority of cultural sentiment.

Gossip is often dismissed as the lowest form of human communication. Rumors set the stage for tragedy in Shakespearean plays. Renaissance paintings depict shadowy whispers, echoing Biblical warnings against idle talk. Socrates questioned the virtue of spreading unverified information.

Gossip is branded as shallow and dumb, for the intellectually incurious.

It’s funny—we love it, yet we also love to hate it.

There’s a centuries-old cultural ambivalence: gossip is a social glue and solvent, a vehicle for both progress and decay.

I see gossip as a pillar of self, social dynamics, and information flow. And just, fun.

Gossip has always fascinated me. And I think it’s mostly good.

Gossip As Moral Introspection

Gossip is a form of moral introspection. It's a tool we use to navigate our personal values systems, much like methodical discussions in a philosophy class.

In philosophy classes, you're introduced to thought experiments — the Trolley Problem, the Ring of Gyges, and so on. These scenarios aren't just academic exercises; they're an invitation to learn the contours of your own moral landscape. You might consider the Trolley Problem from a utilitarian ethical perspective against a Kantian one. Thought experiments give you the space to really consider your own beliefs without the emotional weight of personal life situations.

Gossip serves a similar function. I define gossip as a conversation, whether in person or in writing, about someone who isn’t there. Typically, it involves third-hand situations, passed along through friends or acquaintances. The structure is simple: someone brings up a situation, and then there's a volley of opinions and reactions until a new situation is introduced.

Because you're usually removed from the events being discussed, gossip provides a perfect sandbox for hypothetical moral reasoning. For instance, if you heard that an acquaintance in a toxic relationship cheated on her boyfriend, that might spark a nuanced discussion between you and your fellow gossiper that solidifies your values system.

Gossip As Self-Understanding

Phyllis Rose, in a New Yorker essay, calls gossip the "low end of the Platonic ladder leading to self-understanding." She argues that we seek information about how other people live because we want to understand how to live our own lives. Yet we’re taught from a young age to see this desire as wrong, a form of prying.

As children, we’re sponges; we learn to understand the world around us from observing other people, listening in on their conversations. It's a necessity, given our lack of experience. As adults, we don’t outgrow this. Life is infinitely varied. We'll never live enough to experience every possible scenario. It’s only natural to look at the lives of others as a way to better navigate our own.

Many ideas are more engaging when they can be applied to real-life stories. Having a conversation about monogamy is interesting. Weaving in stories of acquaintances who chose open relationships is more interesting. What good are ideas if we can’t understand how they apply to our lives? If we haven't experienced something yet, the next best thing is to see how it plays out in others' lives.

This is why I’m obsessed with memoirs. While autobiographies document someone’s entire life from their point-of-view, memoirs offer just a snapshot of their life, ripe with juicy anecdotes. In many ways they mimic the structure of gossip. Reading memoirs feels like an exercise in self-reflection and has distinctly expanded my empathy in a way other activities have not. Memoirs prompt me to visualize myself in situations and draw parallels to my own life.

Gossip As Social Bonding

The categorization of gossip as ‘prying’ might be at the root of modern communal disconnect. We’re wired for community, for living and observing and talking with each other. Punishing this instinct is a net negative for the community bonding so many of us desire.

In The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine explains during puberty in teenage girls, changing levels of hormones cause an increased desire to engage in activities like gossiping, sharing secrets, and spending time with friends. Girls experience a dopamine and oxytocin rush during these activities that’s “the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm.”

Gossiping with my friends has always made me feel closer to them. Its akin to creating a sort of shared lore that becomes deeper and more complex the longer our friendship grows.

Gossip As Community Safety

Gossip is one of our most primitive and effective tools for flagging and punishing bad behavior in social groups.

Imagine a scenario in a tightly-knit, hierarchical organization: someone up the ladder starts breaking the rules, maybe in ways that could harm the whole group. In such organizations, calling out higher status members directly is a risky move for lower status members. This is where gossip becomes useful. It's like an underground network for alliance building. One person whispering about an unethical act might not make waves. But a group—that has real power. As gossip circulates, members build a collective awareness and, eventually, a collective strength. Gossip serves as a checks and balances system.

Foucault's concept of the 'panopticon' brings to mind images of oppressive surveillance, but the kind of community watchfulness that gossip brings can actually be positive. In a community where people keep an eye on each other, certain harmful actions, especially those veiled in secrecy like child sexual abuse, are less likely to go unnoticed and unpunished. Gossip isn't just about keeping tabs; it's about setting and maintaining community standards, a kind of social contract.

Gossip As Information Flow

Gossip is often portrayed as an activity of the marginalized, particularly women in patriarchal societies. This portrayal contributes to its somewhat tarnished reputation.

Historically, women were frequently denied education, especially in reading and writing. Literacy is a cornerstone of communication. This exclusion from the standard channels of information — no letters, no publishing in newspapers, no writing books or poetry — left them with few alternatives. Gossip wasn't just entertainment; it was a necessary means for information dissemination.

Gossip becomes essential in large social groups. When a group becomes too big to know everyone personally, gossip becomes an efficient way to share information. It's a sort of social networking tool, predating our digital networks.

This is an interesting parallel to the modern tech ethos of decentralizing information. Just as today's tech leaders champion spreading information outside traditional channels, gossip served a similar function in another time and context. Marginalized women were, in a sense, early adopters of decentralized news and knowledge sharing.

Gossip is at the core of ourselves and our societies — something that's often overlooked in the simplistic moral judgments of it.

I think my response to K sums it up.