Gossip (22 page)

When the story ran, and I was half surprised that it did, it contained two photographs, one of me washing out socks in a bathroom sink, the other of me stretched out on my bed reading a biography of Chekhov.
People
has long since failed to pay me another visit.

The Internet is democracy's revenge on democracy.

—
MOLLY HASKELL

 

I
RECENTLY READ AN
excellent novel called
Crampton Hodnet
by Barbara Pym whose plot, action, and denouement are all triggered by gossip. Gossip is the theme of the book. The subject has to do with a middle-aged Oxford don, feeling himself much taken for granted by his wife and daughter, who begins what will be an unconsummated love affair with an attractive student. His having been seen in a teashop and elsewhere with the student is reported to the don's aunt, a great busybody of a dowager, who takes it upon herself to report this to his wife. The don's averring his love for the student in, of all places, the British Museum is overheard by an assistant librarian at the Bodleian, who tells it to his own mother, who also reports it to the don's wife. Barbara Pym, a novelist of comic subtlety and lovely detachment, captures how delighted everyone is to have these morsels of gossip and the pleasure it gives to serve them around with a heavy dollop of moral indignation. One also gets the sense that gossip traditionally has worked best in a small, one might even say tight, community, such as the north Oxford of her novel provides.

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 someone 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."