{"id":702,"date":"2012-12-10T09:33:27","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T20:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=702"},"modified":"2012-12-10T09:35:51","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T20:35:51","slug":"here-is-the-gossip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=702","title":{"rendered":"Here is the gossip"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I recently watched the whole of the primetime news bulletin on one of the main TV channels.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t have a stopwatch handy, but my best estimate is that at least half of the \u2018news\u2019 and about a third of the \u2018sports news\u2019 was actually just gossip.<\/p>\n

Some less critical viewers might have called it \u2018infotainment\u2019.\u00a0 But, no, it was clearly gossip \u2013 and pretty trivial gossip at that.<\/p>\n

According to some sociologists, gossip plays an important role in the formation and maintenance of communities.\u00a0 The shared pool of often-inconsequential information (and misinformation) apparently helps us to bond together.<\/p>\n

I can see that this may have been so when the community in question was a nomadic hunting group or a small village.<\/p>\n

\u2018Have you heard?\u00a0 Ugg stubbed his toe during the buffalo hunt last night.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Which one\u2019s Ugg again?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018The stupid one.\u2019<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah.\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Him.\u00a0 Gosh, wait \u2018til I tell the girls down at the pumpkin patch.\u2019<\/p>\n

And I can see how it might have worked when the gossip was shared by a sub-group within a larger tribe or perhaps a market town.\u00a0 I can even see that it might work (although whether for good or bad is another matter) in a large workplace.<\/p>\n

But I really struggle to understand how today\u2019s seemingly endless stream of gossip \u2013 especially the largely irrelevant minutiae of the private lives of so-call celebrities \u2013 benefits anyone other than the owners of the media that facilitate its distribution.<\/p>\n

How on earth does the shared knowledge that some manufactured \u2018star\u2019 (of the human variety) may \u2013 or may not \u2013 have enjoyed one too many sherbets at a party to launch another manufactured star\u2019s latest musical-ish offering benefit millions of people spread across 20 or 30 different countries?<\/p>\n

Is it going to turn them into one tight-knit cooperative community?<\/p>\n

No, I don\u2019t think so either.<\/p>\n

Oh, and by the way, did you hear what happened last weekend at the secret party that the Duchess of Disaster threw for some of her super-rich-lister friends?\u00a0 Well \u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently watched the whole of the primetime news bulletin on one of the main TV channels.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t have a stopwatch handy, but my best estimate is that at least half of the \u2018news\u2019 and about a third of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":704,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions\/704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}