The word “gossip”
to me is like dropping the f-bomb. Gossip is something that happens everyday,
all day, and we just can’t escape it. It used to be that gossip travelled
around your office or town, but now, thanks to the Internet, it is a viral
entity.
The Internet
allows for online gossip in all forms. Gossip through social media is probably
the most apparent source on the Internet. With the rise of the public sphere
online, gossip can thrive to its upmost potential. This potential includes the
spread of gossip on an international scale in seconds. If someone desires to
spread a rumor all they have to do is type it into Twitter or another source,
and BAM the gossip starts to spread on an unlimited boundless rampage that can
make it from Canada to China at an overwhelming speed. Twitter, Facebook, and
blogs, to name a few are both a great and wretched source of gossip.
I personally use
Twitter as my main source of obtaining gossip. If I hear a rumor going around I
use Twitter to both read the gossip Twitter feeds and to go on the particular
source’s Twitter to see what they have to say about clearing up any rumors. For
example when the big explosive gossip came out that Beyoncé lip-synced at Obama’s Inauguration (Oh-my! What a
sin! Insert rolling eyes here), I first saw all of the gossip on twitter and
immediately I went to Beyoncé's Twitter to see if she said anything about it.
The funny thing
about gossip is that it is 50/50 true or false (gossip is not always a rumor!)
I think that is why most of us thrive on it, because there is a possibility
that it could be very true but then a mystery that it may be false and we must
hunt for the truth. Of course gossip existed before the Internet but it was
less easily accessible before online use. Before the Internet we could chose to
go out and buy a magazine and buy into the gossip. Now gossip is free and
viral, choosing to buy into gossip is not the case anymore, but rather the
moment we open up a browser that enables us to interface with the world wide
web, which for most of us this happens many times a day, we are bombarded with
gossip.
Mathew Ingram in
If you think Twitter doesn't break news
you're living in a dream world
describes news as a process because it goes through many media outlets and the
mainstream news outlets have now expanded to social media platforms such as
Twitter. Even if the source is not “credible” that doesn’t matter to many
people anymore, because gossip that is spread through social media spreads like
wildfire and if more than one Twitter feed is saying it, it must be true,
right?
If you choose to
be on social media, gossip is inevitable!
Cheers from
another participating citizen of media,
Elyse
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