The Power and Purpose of Rumours


Young people are effectively re-enacting a marital and extra-marital scandals discussed any day in newspapers and on television. Their possess scandals of artfulness and disloyalty are discussed in playgrounds and corridors, in a inside remoteness of toilets or a resting vicinity of bedrooms – who allegedly pronounced what about whom and who allegedly did what with whom. Elias and Scotson (1994) write about a ‘gossip mills’ of a village where, a some-more threatened and uncertain people are feeling, a some-more expected it is that gossip will be mistaken for fact (p95). This is constant of rumours. Rumours are expected to be treated as contribution depending on a turn of common stress that exists about whatever underlying emanate a latest report addresses. The report that a lady has chlamydia fast becomes a matter of fact since everybody is concerned about chlamydia. The report that a boy’s partner cheated on him becomes a fact since everybody is concerned about their partner intrigue on them. Collective anxieties are projected onto other people and called ‘rumours’.

Alisha loves her beloved though he competence be going to separate adult with her, she says, since there are wrong rumours going turn that she had sex with another child on a propagandize trip. we don’t know Alisha’s beloved though I’m utterly certain that a reason since these ‘rumours’ impact him is because, inevitably, he wonders what Alisha gets adult to when he’s not around and either she’s as constant to him as she insists.

I determine with her that these rumours are astray and annoying. “I suspect everybody wonders what it would be like to be tighten to someone else,” we say. “We competence unequivocally adore someone though still imagination other people a bit.”

She thinks about this.

“You and your beloved competence adore any other and have no skeleton to separate adult but, from time to time, we competence both consternation what it would be like to go out with someone else.”

“Of course,” she says, “but that doesn’t meant we don’t adore him, does it!”

We pause, meditative about this before relocating on to speak about something else. My wish is that by acknowledging a underlying stress and normalising it, we’ve taken divided some of a mortal power. The rumours might now feel reduction awful and Alisha might be means to understanding with them some-more confidently.

Rumours of fidelity and unfaithfulness, reserve and danger…. Do we unequivocally adore me? How many do we adore me? Do we adore me as many as we adore other people? How can we be certain that we adore me? Why can’t we infer that we adore me? These questions raid us since they’re a questions we ask creatively and many urgently of the parents.

Reference:

Elias, N. and Scotson, J.I. (1994) The Established and The Outsiders. London: Sage.

Tags:
alisha, annoy and tears, anxieties, chlamydia, corridors, duplicity, elias, report mills, innuendo, uncertain people, late night phone, miscommunication, othello, people carrying sex, people carrying sex with people, playgrounds, rumour, scandals, matter of fact, unfaithfulness

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