Mobile Gossip Is Good for Us
Created by Catherine Howell (University of Cambridge) on May 12, 2006
It's official. Talking on your cell phone about nothing is good for you.
Kate Fox, researcher at the Social Issues Research Centre, University of Oxford, argues the case for mobile gossip in "Evolution, Alienation and Gossip: The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century".
Key research findings include:
Kate Fox, researcher at the Social Issues Research Centre, University of Oxford, argues the case for mobile gossip in "Evolution, Alienation and Gossip: The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century".
"Gossip is not a trivial pastime: it is essential to human social, psychological and even physical well-being. The mobile phone, by facilitating therapeutic gossip in an alienating and fragmented modern world, has become a vital 'social lifeline', helping us to re-create the more natural communication patterns of pre-industrial times."
Key research findings include:
- Mobile gossip is good for us
- Mobile phones are the new garden fence
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The difference, I think,
The difference, I think, between pre-industrial "grooming networks" of old and the sort of thing that's being posited as such in a post-industrial context, is the demographics. I suspect that people's mobile lists are much more demographically, socially, gender, and race uniform than pre-industrial "village" type interaction.I guess that has good sides as well as bad. On the one hand it's liberating for minorities, but on the other I guess it can be self-reinforcing and disintegrative, too.I think this links in with the way that the interactions become very elective to a much greter extent than was ever the case before, which I guess is good and bad, too. At the worst I think that the large degree of election and the stratification can make your friends become "the voices in your head": simply the extension of your own psyche, to accompany the soundtrack of your life as it plays on your iPod.On the other hand, I think it's interesting the way that many of the integrative developments in social theory emerged with industrialisation, perhaps partly as a consequence of a decrease in election in social interaction, so there's a real question as to the extent, in a situation where those constraints are removed, if that integrative society remains necessary, which is an awkward notion, for me at least.I'm not sure what implications that has in an education context, though....
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