Gossip, Epistemology, and Power
Knowledge Underground
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Book
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Chapter
Gossip’s Bad Reputation
This chapter surveys the history of gossip from its origins in intimacy to its current degraded status as trivial, false, or malicious.
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Chapter
Failure to Communicate: Gossip as Institutional Conflict
This chapter examines a double standard in academic gossip; it is used by outsiders as a way to get and spread information and ideas about the profession, while being invisibly used (while externally denounced...
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Chapter
Weaponized Gossip
This chapter articulates some conditions that facilitate negative gossip: compromised trust, small, insular communities, and sharp or turbulent power divisions.
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Chapter
Eichmann in Albuquerque
In this chapter, I argue that Breaking Bad’s Walter White is an excellent model of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil. Arendt’s position in Eichmann in Jerusalem, understood as a cognitive model of em...
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Chapter
Conclusion: Schools for Scandal
This chapter summarizes the book, argues for a single, consistent standard around the use and identification of gossip, and suggests social practices that facilitate good gossip.
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Chapter
Introduction: Some Loose Talk About Gossip
This chapter introduces the book’s argument. Despite its bad reputation, gossip is a crucial epistemic tool for marginalized people, as a way of comparing ideas and constructing arguments.
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Chapter
The Word On the Street: Gossip’s Contributions to Knowledge
Gossip’s specific contributions to knowledge are demonstrated; it helps people select ideas or hypotheses from a host of possibilities, and it helps synthesize apparently disconnected ideas or information.
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Chapter
Rumors Help the Enemy! Gossip in Politics
This chapter examines gossip in American politics; while gossip has been a long-standing accompaniment and facilitator to political negotiation, its presence has been selectively denounced in recent case studi...
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Chapter
Gossip in the Ether: How the Internet Does, and Doesn’t, Change Gossip
This chapter examines online gossip and argues that while online gossip can be crucial for some marginalized communities (as a way of finding virtual solidarity amid physical marginalization), its anonymity, i...
