Gossip is idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others. It forms one of the oldest and most common means of sharing (unproven) facts and views, but also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information thus transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature, as opposed to normal conversation.
Over the last decade, gossip has come to the attention of academia as a fruitful avenue of study, particularly in light of its relationship to both overt and implicit power structures.[Gossip can serve to:[1]
- normalise and reinforce moral boundaries in a speech-community
- foster and build a sense of community with shared interests and information
- build structures of social accountability
- further mutual social grooming (like many other uses of language, only more so)
- provide a mating tool that allows (for example) women to mutually identify socially desirable men and compare notes on which men are better than others.
- be used as a form of passive aggression, as a tool to isolate and harm others
- provide a peer-to-peer mechanism for disseminating information in organizations
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário