Word: macrogossip
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...late 20th century, technology has immeasurably complicated the business of gossip. Television, radio, the people pages of newspapers and magazines have all conspired to create international class gossip. This macrogossip detaches the usual human taletelling from its local roots. The result is sometimes a resonant emptiness, the feeling of futility that might overcome the soul after watching Bob Hope and Brooke Shields host a television special. Macrogossip tends to be exemplary, cautionary, ceremonial and merely entertaining-like public hangings...
...gossip favors, even enjoys, dirt (the failings of character)," wrote the critic John Leonard, "it is because we suspect ourselves, and the suspicion is a shrewd one." Yet, oddly, people do not seem to object to being gossiped about as much as they once did. After all, as macrogossip has instructed, any gossip is a form of attention, a sort of evanescent celebrity. Even gossip works to keep away what Saul Bellow called "the wolf of insignificance." Privacy is not the highest priority; on the contrary, a certain emotional exhibitionism has been gaining ground. Of course...
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