how people find out people are talking about them when said people are not talking to them. It's not that I don't like gossip. It's that I don't understand it. I literally seem to have trouble paying attention to anything not aimed straight at me with a missile launcher.
Gossip is something you are either attuned to or not. A lot of it comes down to social attitudes, I reckon. I come from a small village, so gossip is part of our social structure to a huge extent - it provides the support system, the social bonds that tie us together, and thus becomes a form of currency. If you aren't part of the gossip network then you are on your own if something goes wrong, and who wants that. And I tend to unconsciously carry those attitudes over to LJ. Where they come head to head with people with an urban attitude who view gossip as some sort of intrusion on their privacy. But I'm not just a peasant but a militant peasant so my response to urban attitudes involves two fingers.
But on LJ it is simple - if something turns up on my flist that I don't understand I will ask around and follow links until I have a decent context for it. It doesn't take much time. I would say the strikethrough kerfuffle shows that gossip can spread on LJ at almost the same speed as it does in our village, which is quite impressive. The only time I have found people bitching specifically about me it was not so much behind my back, since I wouldn't call a public post of someone on my flist as behind my back (although I have a feeling they were stupid enough to think it was), but if they did talk about me anywhere else I suppose I would pick up on it the same way as any other sort of gossip.
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Gossip is something you are either attuned to or not. A lot of it comes down to social attitudes, I reckon. I come from a small village, so gossip is part of our social structure to a huge extent - it provides the support system, the social bonds that tie us together, and thus becomes a form of currency. If you aren't part of the gossip network then you are on your own if something goes wrong, and who wants that. And I tend to unconsciously carry those attitudes over to LJ. Where they come head to head with people with an urban attitude who view gossip as some sort of intrusion on their privacy. But I'm not just a peasant but a militant peasant so my response to urban attitudes involves two fingers.
But on LJ it is simple - if something turns up on my flist that I don't understand I will ask around and follow links until I have a decent context for it. It doesn't take much time. I would say the strikethrough kerfuffle shows that gossip can spread on LJ at almost the same speed as it does in our village, which is quite impressive. The only time I have found people bitching specifically about me it was not so much behind my back, since I wouldn't call a public post of someone on my flist as behind my back (although I have a feeling they were stupid enough to think it was), but if they did talk about me anywhere else I suppose I would pick up on it the same way as any other sort of gossip.