Sunday, August 28, 2005

And you thought it was Bad

"Gossip is not a trivial pastime: it is essential to human social, psychological and even physical well-being."

That is according to this study

Anyone who has been the victim of malicious gossip might beg to disagree though. Gossip can make you feel your privacy has been violated. It can stigmatize & humiliate people. Or it can lead to a culture where everyone is restricted for fear of the gossips. Somehow I can't see it as positively as this research suggests.

7 Comments:

Blogger haal said...

Don't know, but I dont like to gossiping dedicated settings. I gossip but I try to have it part of the conversation and only takes couple of minutes but not the whole conversation time. It is really heavy when you talk about others intensively. I feel bad actually afterwards because I dont like people to gossip about me, so I prefer to not do the same to them.

But I assume it is ok to gossip but the healthy ones!!

Can we just stop gossiping? Well, I know people who dont at all, and they are perfectly fine.

Why do we gossip? does the study say? (too lazy to follow the link)

8/28/2005 10:04:00 AM  
Blogger LouLou said...

"Why do we gossip? does the study say? "

It's a human instinct apparently. Natural curiosity - desire to learn from other's experiences for better social bonding. We also like to know what others are doing to know how we compare - where we fit in etc...

8/28/2005 12:48:00 PM  
Blogger haal said...

'We also like to know what others are doing to know how we compare'

So it is out of lack of self-confident, insecurity, and lack of confidence in our choices and maybe destiny and thus faith....? Can it go down to faith?!!

8/28/2005 12:55:00 PM  
Blogger roora said...

Loulou , I actually don't like gossiping , and after I do , I acually feel by guilty . Because it is a very big sin in Islam and I actually can't imagine some one taking from my good deeds because I gossiped him one day,

I agree with you that we have to expose ourselves to the others' community to learn , but it could be done without gossiping also .
Usually when some one wants to advice me by something and he /she gives me examples of other people (that I may know )who passed through the same situation , they usually don't say the names and who are they . They just narrate the incident.

But what do you mean by gossip ? sometimes i ask about a person of how he /she is because I knew that they were in bad circumstances and the people go on and tell me about these people 's current situation but without offense or saying bad words about them

, so could this be a form of gossip? Lw keda , Elwa7ed will not talk khales

8/28/2005 02:08:00 PM  
Blogger haal said...

If gossip was not a very big big sin in Islam, would we still gossip?

8/28/2005 02:23:00 PM  
Blogger LouLou said...

haal,

"So it is out of lack of self-confident, insecurity, and lack of confidence in our choices."

Well you don't learn everything in life in school or from books or within your family. A lot of social norms you pick up from observing those around you. And gossip is one way to observe others.

For example sometimes hearing a story about trouble in someone else's marriage will cause you to appreciate your marriage more. And sometimes hearing that someone did X & got into trouble might be a warning to you if you are doing the same thing.

The study finds that two thirds of all human conversation can be considered gossip and that most of it is beneficial - in terms of spreading knowledge & creating social bonding & community spirit.

What bothers me personally is that they say nothing about the negative side of gossip. I mean if I want to learn from you experience why don't I just ask you?Why do I have to go & try to find out from someone else behind your back?There's something sneaky & dishonest about that don't you think?

8/28/2005 03:01:00 PM  
Blogger doshar said...

i think "gossip" as people usually refer to , is the talk about other people's affairs for the sake of entertainment. and in alot of times, this might get into criticizing, judging, mocking etc. these things would besides hurt those gossipped about, would notlet us have a good chance to criticize or evaluate our ownselves, also expands our judgemental nature (which we should supress. no one knows the other's excuses or motives)

the other kind you refer to, like seeing a bad marriage, so appreciating your own , is ok i guess, we live by example. even the quran is full of examples for us to learn. maybe it would be better though to know a whole story but dismiss names, to appreciate their privacy. alot of people would not like to be a lebana in people's mouth even for the sake of examples.

btw, there are some exceptions of halal ghaiba. (talking about someone behind their back with what they would hate).


i remember i read an article about afat el lesan : diseases of the tongue. where they were categrized properly. if i find it around, i will give you the info

8/28/2005 05:00:00 PM  

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