Why Gossip Matters More Than We Think
“Social media is…like walking into a room and shouting something without looking anyone in the eye.”
Helen is a guest author for Gather. She is a communications strategist for global brands, a sustainability expert, and a community commentator.
I’ve been thinking about gossip recently.
We spend around 52 minutes a day gossiping. All of us do it. And everyone who came before us did it too. You can go back through history and see it at the centre of social life. But no one actually wants to be known as a gossip, do they?
That wasn’t always the case.
The word gossip comes from the pre-1150 phrase god-sip, from god and sib, meaning akin or related. A godsib was someone with spiritual affinity to another, often a sponsor at a baptism. Over time, the word expanded to include a woman’s female friends invited to be present at a birth: a place where conversation could take place unheard, where privacy gave women power.
So gossip originally implied connection and trust.
In ancient Greece, slaves gossiped about their masters if they’d been treated badly. These conversations acted as a kind of protection. Gossip could be used against the powerful in public. It was a tool of the powerless, a way to warn each other, to make sense of what was happening, and to hold power to account.
More recently, gossip has become something else. Something malicious and trivial, even though research examining British conversations found that most gossip is harmless, with only 3–4% showing any real malice.
It also became gendered.
Even though men gossip just as much as women, gossip was increasingly framed as a female activity. Men became worried that when women spent time together talking, they might gain too much power. Groups of women “gossiping” became targets for ridicule, suspicion, and eventually violence.
During the witch hunts, women were forced to accuse each other under torture. Friends turned in friends. Daughters turned in mothers. The idea that women love to bitch about each other isn’t some natural truth. It was invented. This brilliant podcast delves deeper into the subject: Witches.
And so gossip shifted from a word of friendship into a word of denigration. A way to suppress the voices of the powerless, and to separate them from each other. Which feels relevant now.
Because gossip, as I’m defining it here, was about talking privately to people you trusted. About making sense of what was really going on. And about holding the people who had power over you to account, when you had no other route.
That kind of connection still exists, often quietly, in the stories people tell about finding their way into community in real life.
Something I think we desperately need more of.
We’re living through multiple, overlapping crises: climate, biodiversity, inequality. And we keep trying to solve them almost exclusively through formal channels, like the news, policy papers, panels, keynote speeches, and C-suites talking to each other. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone seriously ask: how do we point the power of gossip at solving these problems?
And gossip does many of the jobs that need doing right now.
It spreads ideas and information across social networks.
It reinforces and transmits social norms and values.
It builds and maintains a sense of community with shared interests and beliefs.
It helps people organise.
It creates collective cohesion and agreement.
Still, we idolise news. Gossip is seen as trivial and informal. The news as serious and respected.
News is easily distributed via the internet. Gossip is too, but the kind that actually changes how people feel and behave tends to exist in real life, in places where we feel safe. And unfortunately, we’ve lost a lot of those places.
It’s harder to meet face-to-face now. So we rely on news to keep us connected to the world “out there”, instead of the gossip we used to hear over the neighbour’s fence or at the pub. But news doesn’t bind us together in the same way.
We feel closer to each other when we share small secrets. Gossip binds us because it’s reciprocal and relational in a way the news simply isn’t. Especially now, when much of the news feels like a bonfire designed to make us feel separate, anxious, and powerless.
Is social media gossip? I’m not sure it always is. Posts aren’t really gossip. They don’t happen in conversation. They’re more like walking into a room and shouting something without looking anyone in the eye.
Gossip requires a speaker and a listener who is actually listening.
That’s the other thing about gossip. It’s active, not passive. It’s best when it’s participated in, not consumed. We lean forward. We laugh. We get angry. The news rarely has the same impact. And a big part of that is physical proximity. Gossip happens when we’re close to each other, something that is physiologically good for us, not just socially useful.
I’m not saying we no longer need investigative journalism or a free press. We absolutely do. Journalism informs. It scales information. It exposes wrongdoing. But it doesn’t, on its own, change norms or make people brave.
If you asked most people what journalism is for, they’d say it’s “to inform the public about what’s going on in the world”. And for something to count as news it must be fact-checked, professionally edited, ethically sourced, and carefully distanced from gossip or rumour.
All of that matters.
But if we want to change society, we need both. Formal news and informal gossip networks. Because behaviour doesn’t change when people are informed. It changes when people feel socially supported, morally permitted, and less alone.
Movements like #MeToo didn’t spread because of a single article. They spread because people quietly said, “this happened to me too,” and over time, the balance of power shifted.
Attention is a scarce resource.
Gossip tells us where to look. It points out the things some people would rather we didn’t see. It redirects attention to hidden secrets and uncomfortable truths. So maybe gossip isn’t the problem. Maybe losing it is.
This does not mean we should gossip without care. Before you share, check yourself. As Socrates supposedly said, always ask: Is it true? Is it good? Is it useful?
And if it is, maybe we should gossip more. See people in real life. Share a secret. Start small. Notice how much you learn, how much closer you feel to people, how much clearer you feel about what’s really going on around you, and how much braver you become as those connections deepen.
If we want a more sustainable, more equitable, more regenerative future, we need to use all the tools we have at our disposal. Even the ones we were told to be ashamed of.
Call it gossip if you like.
Or, if you’re uncomfortable with that, call it a gathering.
Gather helps people find and start real-world gatherings where trust, conversation, and connection can grow.