One of the characters, the assistant librarian at the Bodleian, keeps his mother and others "entertained with spiteful bits of gossip." The dowager aunt views passing on gossip as a duty of a kind, noting that "there are some things that one cannot let pass without comment. It is a duty one has to other people, not always a pleasant or an easy duty, but one which must be performed." The assistant librarian's mother claims that "we do not tell stories about people for our own amusement," which is partially true, for condemnation of other people ranks higher as a priority than mere amusement for the characters in this novel. The don in Crampton Hodnet being gossiped about does not win much sympathy as a victim, for, about to go off on a trip with a colleague he does not much like, he thinks that "at least they would be able to have a good talk about old times, rejoicing over those of their contemporaries who had not fulfilled their early promise and belittling those who had." The novelist's point here is that the man being gossiped about has himself a taste for gossip. Pym has another character "often notice that clever people were inclined to be fond of spiteful gossip." Too true, of course.
Smart and charming though Barbara Pym's novel is, one cannot help but feel something akin to nostalgia for the kind of old-fashioned gossip it chronicles. Nostalgia because, though such gossip doubtless still exists in small, isolated places, the older traditions of gossip have now been altered, and radically. What has changed everything is the Internet, one of whose clearest side effects has been greatly to speed the spread of gossip. Endless are the websites devoted to gossip. Gawker.com, TMZ.com, Pagesix.com are only among the most prominent for general celebrity gossip, and there are scores of others dedicated to realms of more specialized gossip.
On April 1, 2010, the New York Times published a lengthy article under the headline "The Walter Winchells of Cyberspace." The article featured nine people, all of them in their twenties or early thirties, who are attempting to earn a living by purveying gossip in finance, show business, real estate, teen life, fashion, the Ivy League, urban culture industries, sports, you name it, all exclusively over the Internet.
As every academic subject has its politics, so does every division and kind of work have its gossip, and lots of it now appears on the Internet. Early in the Times article, its author, Alex Williams, writes what is becoming truer and truer every day: "The line between 'reporter' and 'blogger,' 'gossip' and 'news,' has blurred almost beyond distinction." He goes on to note that blogging has become "a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence, and an actual paycheck."
Even e-mail, by its very nature of being something dashed off, without the forethought of an old-fashioned letter, is gossip-prone; one writes something indiscreet about another person in an e-mail, says oh what the hell, clicks Send, and whoosh, off it goes. Then there are the social network websites: Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, MyLife, and others, all highly charged conveyors of gossip in the realm of personal life, sometimes accompanied by photographs of their authors, drunk or naked or in other forms of moral deshabille. Add to all this the blogs, hundreds of thousands of them, in fact by now millions of them. Blogs can be many things, but they function chiefly as engines of opinionation. And where there is unbridled opinion—uncensored and served up without established standards or responsible checks—gossip is likely to be not far behind.
No one is safe from gossip on the Internet. An example is Elena Kagan, the most recent U.S. Supreme Court justice. While Justice Kagan was under consideration for the Court, in his Daily Dish website the journalist Andrew Sullivan, who runs a much-visited blog and is also a gay activist, brought up the question of whether Kagan, who was then fifty and never married, might be a lesbian. He felt it important to know. "It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish," Sullivan wrote. "We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay ... and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively."
Andrew Sullivan's "item" about Elena Kagan was immediately picked up by CBS, which put it on its website. All sorts of websites, from gay to wing nut, followed. Next television got into the act by mentioning the item. The Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn went on The O'Reilly Factor to report that in Washington conversation this was Topic Number One. Bill O'Reilly claimed that he hated this story, but, come to think of it, as he evidently did, it was important to know whether Kagan was a lesbian, for if she were to be confirmed as a justice, she would at some time in her tenure be asked to pass judgment on gay marriage.
The White House now pitched in, denying that Elena Kagan was gay. This set off a bevy of further online comments on the homophobia of the Obama administration. (What's wrong with her being gay?) Suddenly everything was out of control, and all one could think of in connection with Elena Kagan, who until then had apparently had a calm life and an exemplary career, was whether or not she was a lesbian. None of this would have happened if the Internet hadn't begun the greasy ball rolling.
If Elena Kagan is gay, surely she is well within her rights, if she so chooses, to keep it to herself. But the damage has been done. No longer will it be possible to think of Justice Kagan without ever so slightly wondering about her true sexual nature. This is what is so insidious about gossip of this kind, its propensity for muddying waters. In its online version, of course, such gossip travels faster and farther than in any other form. In an earlier time, no serious newspaper, no respectable television channel or radio station, would have asked about a Supreme Court nominee's sex life. Such dreck would have been left to the gutter press to dangle for the delectation of the low-minded. Some things might be thought but are still better left unsaid. No longer. Not in cyberspace, which, like a dirty mind, never sleeps.
Until the invention and widespread use of the Internet, gossip could be conveniently divided between private and public spheres, as it for the most part has been in the first two parts of this book. But like the distinction between gossip and news, that between the private and the public has become decisively blurred. Private gossip is largely restricted to include friends (and enemies) and acquaintances, while public gossip is about people in public life who appear in print or on radio or television, broadcast for the titillation of the larger world. To qualify for public gossip, one had to have achieved some measure of fame or notoriety. But with the advent of the Internet, one can arrive at notoriety without having first achieved anything.
"The Internet," writes Daniel J. Solove, a legal scholar interested in the questions, problems, and issues of privacy, "is transforming the nature and effects of gossip." In his book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, Solove recounts some of the ways this is so. He tells the story of an insensitive remark that appeared online, supposedly spoken by the clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger: "If I had known that African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians would buy my clothes, I would not have made them so nice." Hilfiger is also supposed to have confirmed that he made this most impolitic remark on Oprah, causing Ms. Winfrey to throw him off her show and tell her audience not to buy his clothes. The effect of this caused Hilfiger's business to slump drastically. The problem is that Tommy Hilfiger never made the remark, nor had he ever appeared on Oprah. But the story was out there in cyberspace; you will find it is still out there today.
Professor Solove tells many such stories. There's the woman whose name came up on the Internet as the alleged rape victim of Kobe Bryant. She wasn't in fact the victim, just the object of speculation of some ill-informed blogger. Her name remains on the Internet as a rape victim, there for her future husband and everyone else to contemplate.
Solove tells the story of a girl in South Korea who refused to clean up after her dog on a subway. A fellow rider with a cell-phone camera caught her in the act of refusal and passed it along to someon
e else, who put it on his blog. A man with a much more popular blog picked it up and put it on his site, and from there it took off, so that the girl became known around the world as the "dog-poop girl." She was henceforth harassed, as was her family, and because of it she eventually decided it would be best to drop out of the university she attended. The moral here isn't that you should always clean up after your dog, even though you should, but that you never know who's watching, and if it's the wrong person and he has a phone camera and a friend with a blog, it can mean serious trouble.
Not long ago in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times, a young woman wrote a letter to an advice columnist saying that she recently broke up with her boyfriend, who has written about the breakup in his blog in a way that makes her look bad. The problem is, as she notes, if a prospective employer decides to search for her name on Google and discovers all the terrible things her ex-boyfriend has said about her, it could—more than could, it is likely to—be damaging to her chances of getting the job, not to speak of getting future boyfriends.
The Internet has been splendid in the freedom it has given people to express their opinions, in catching out politicians in egregious lies and journalists in shoddy practice, and in so much else. This immense freedom of the Internet is part of its glory. Freedom has allowed it to be iconoclastic, aiding young entrepreneurs with new ideas in design and for daily living, allowing performing artists to display their talent without constraint on YouTube, unaffiliated thinkers to express their ideas, ordinary people to express themselves, protesting citizens to overthrow dictatorships. No one would wish to take that away.
But it is the other side of that freedom—the freedom to libel, to invade privacy, to wreck lives—that has got so little, though greatly needed, attention. Professor Solove remarks that the Internet is, historically, in its adolescence—and it is precisely as an adolescent that it now tends to act: wildly, thoughtlessly, destructively. Lars Nelson, of the New York Daily News, has called the Internet, in this aspect of its young career, "a vanity press for the demented," and this is more than an amusing phrase.
The chief instruments of this destruction are Facebook, Twitter, and above all the blog, a name that derives from weblog, and its ally, the link. No one knows how many million blogs now exist, nor how many fresh postings—or new entries—are sent out each day. While many blogs are, as we have seen, narrowly specialized in their interests, the majority tend to be personal diaries made public. That people are willing to expose their private thoughts and feelings to the scrutiny of strangers is a sign of how radically personal notions of privacy have changed. The problem is that in many blogs, so much of what used to go into diaries can now, when served up online for anyone who cares to read them, do real damage to other people. Sometimes feelings get hurt; not infrequently much more is at stake.
Solove tells of a young woman working in the office of a U.S. senator who published a blog in which she blithely set out the details of her sex life. Her activity was frequent, and the details she supplied were copious, including the oddities of the appetites of the men with whom she bedded down. This man preferred only anal sex, that one had a taste for spanking, another gave her money for sex—that sort of thing. Soon enough her blog, originally meant only for a few of her friends, was picked up by a Beltway blog called Wonkette, itself known for its bawdiness, which had a larger following, and presently the young woman's name and the details of her sex life were broadcast much more widely than she claims at first she intended.
The strangeness of the story is that the young woman didn't seem to mind the publicity. She rather liked the notoriety it brought her. "Public embarrassment," she wrote, "is really very liberating. You really stop caring about what people think, which is something only the elderly seem to be able to accomplish with great aplomb. So I am way ahead of everybody. And those of you behind me can kiss my ass."
Some of the men she wrote about felt much less at ease with public embarrassment than she, and at least one, who argued that he was readily identifiable in her blog, sued her for invasion of privacy, claiming "severe emotional distress, humiliation, embarrassment, and anguish." Hard cheese on him, as the English say. The young woman, whose name is Jessica Cutler, flourished, at least as we understand flourishing in contemporary life. She was interviewed and photographed naked by Playboy; she wrote a novel called Washingtonienne (the name of her blog), for which she is said to have been given a $300,000 advance; and she eventually married a bankruptcy lawyer with whom she has had a daughter. No business like blog business, at least for some.
I am glad to have ceased teaching in a university before the Internet culture got going in a big-time way—before, that is, students had blogs in which, under proper disguise, they could say cruel things about one's teaching or dress or character. Let them think cruel things, or anything else for that matter, but to have it online, as part of the permanent public record, is not so much daunting as saddening—at least it would have been to me.
Two incidents: In a writing course I taught many years ago, a student, a young woman suffering from depression, on the last day of the course launched into an attack on me for favoring the would-be fiction writers in the class over the would-be poets, of whom she was one. I had no notion of doing so, and in fact hadn't a very clear idea which students wanted to be novelists and which poets. The young woman's tirade spoiled the final day of the class, and when it was over a number of students in the course came to apologize for her and to thank me for my efforts over the quarter, which touched me. This, as I say, was before the era of blogs. Today, with a blog at her disposal, the depressed young woman could have done my reputation as a teacher real damage, by posting her delusional views of me on her blog.
In another course I taught, this one on Willa Cather, a young woman told a friend who was going out with a graduate student with whom I was friendly that I favored male over female students in the class. She based this on my calling on more male than female students during discussion sessions. In truth, I would have been delighted to call on a hermaphroditic armadillo if I thought it had an intelligent contribution to make to class discussion. (It depressed me to think of a young woman, whose parents were spending more than $40,000 a year on her education, sitting there counting the number of males and females on whom her teacher was calling.) Again, I am thankful that this occurred before the age of the blog, or I would also have been saddled with the reputation of a misogynist. The combination of the Internet and political correctness is a powerful force for ... I am not sure what, but am fairly certain it isn't the truth.
Malice, as we have seen, is also too often an element of gossip, and the Internet, in this connection, can be a powerful aid to malice, by spreading falsehoods—or even harmful truths—with a speed undreamed of by small-town over-the-back-fence gossips. Sometimes not even malice is required for the Internet to do its job as an engine for gossip. Things are mentioned on one blog, picked up by another, linked by a third to two others, and soon something meant to be strictly intramural becomes global.
Professor Solove tells of a college student, pressed for time, who asked someone who specialized in a certain subject to write a class paper for her. The man, feeling her request morally objectionable, nonetheless agreed to do so, putting into the paper all sorts of obvious errors, thinking it would bring down her grade, and then he sent an e-mail to the dean of her college informing him of what he had done. While at it, he posted on his blog that the student, whom he named, was a plagiarist. More people picked up on his blog posting than he expected, and soon the student was the subject of wide interest on the Internet, with lots of strangers writing condemnatory responses about her behavior. Suddenly people began calling her school and home, to go on record about what a wretched person she was. Meanwhile, the man who started it all wanted to call a halt; things, he felt, had got well out of hand. He wanted the young woman exposed, but not publicly pilloried. "I was faced with all of you people looking for blood," he wrote on his blog.
"I didn't want blood. What I wanted was irony." The young woman was of course wrong, but did she deserve so widespread a shaming as the blogosphere here provided?
Earlier I wrote about the wide-ranging effects of gossip, its good qualities in supplying important information not available in any other form and its destructive ones when motivated by meanness and the intent to bring a person down. But on the harmful side, the Internet has quickened, and much intensified, the harm that gossip can do to its victims. Sometimes this harm is impersonal, or nearly so. The Internet, it turns out, also has a vigilante, or posse, function that is an arm of gossip. In this respect, you not only accuse a person of wrongdoing, but also join forces with others to round him up, as in the cases of the poor dog-poop girl or the student who asked someone else to write her paper.
Blogs exist, among other things, to shame people who fall below what are thought to be proper standards of behavior, in which the people who do so are named for anyone to see. I learned from Professor Solove's book that there is a blog called Bitterwaitress, which names poor tippers on what it calls the Shitty Tipper Database, or anyone who leaves tips of under fifteen, or in some cases twenty, percent of the check. The best-selling writer Malcolm Gladwell found himself named on this blog, though he claims not to recollect ever undertipping. But once his name appeared on the list, his claims counted for nothing.
Another such blog is called Don't Date Him Girl, which lists men, and their profiles, who in their relationships with women have been disloyal, sexually aggressive, liars, mama's boys, and any other information that is useful in condemning these men. All this information may be quite true—men, as I am fond of telling my granddaughter, are brutes—but what if some of it isn't? What if some of the names are placed there because a woman feels falsely betrayed or is herself psychologically off kilter or is seeking revenge for a man's not finding her attractive? In Don't Date Him Girl and other such blogs, the old question arises: Who is guarding the guardians?
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