Article:

Gossip’s ephemeral longevity: Power, circulation, and new media

This essay argues that gossip reveals cultural networks that can support a range of functions, whether celebrity visibility, crowd-sourced anonymity, or anti-colonial revolt. Examining gossip through interdisciplinary scholarship in subaltern studies, psychology, literary criticism, media studies, and history, the essay elaborates its imbrication in these cultural networks along with its role in the creation of new media forms. The first part of the essay traces the semantic permutations of ‘gossip’ alongside related terms, elucidating gossip’s function as a network builder and didactic mode via new media. The second part offers a series of non-exhaustive case studies from the 1600s to the present that demonstrate gossip’s role in creating new connected publics, exerting social pressure, providing protection, and offering resistance against established institutions. This transhistorical perspective for considering gossip in relation to print and digital media brings together eighteenth-century periodicals, the #FreeBritney campaign for Britney Spears, the ‘Shitty Media Men’ spreadsheet, and slave revolts. By examining how ‘ephemeral’ gossip creates material outcomes, the essay shows how gossip works while illuminating its contradictory designations of trivial irrelevance and dangerous power.