After working with a lot of young people over the past 10 years– in the Linux orbit and now in the music orbit– I’ve noticed that the younger generation has zero tolerance for gossip or talking shit about people. They view it as a serious character flaw, and don’t want anything to do with it, or the people who do it. It seems to be an offense on the order of being racist or sexist– it’s just not OK.
I don’t remember such a strong taboo against gossip and trash-talking when I was younger. I remember many people doing it, all the time. Particularly in the business world, we were always venting about such-and-so, or gossipping about what various other people, departments, executives, etc, were up to. There was a very high-bandwidth grapevine, and the scuttlebutt flew fast and wide. Granted, we didn’t diss our own friends and close circle of trusted confidants, but outside of that, it was a continual bitch-fest.
But now, kids get visibly embarassed hearing “hating on” anyone at all, and definitely don’t want to be perceived as being a “hater” themselves. I haven’t heard anyone who is now under the age of 30 talk shit about anyone else, ever.
Granted, if you look back a hundred years ago or longer, gossip has always been considered a sign of bad character and poor breeding. But that taboo relaxed sometime, and became fairly common by the late 20th century. And now it’s a taboo again.
I’m curious where that return to tradition happened, and how. Is it from the rap scene, where all the “h8ting” turned into inter-crew violence in the 90’s? Is it from the now ubiquity of the Internet, where any trash-talking or gossip is too easily traceable back to its source, and forwarded or shown to its subject? I remember when I first started using email almost 20 years ago, how quickly (and traumatically) I learned to be scrupulously careful about anything I write and sign. To this day, it can take me an hour to finish even the simplest email, after many cycles of revising and reviewing. But informal communications were verbal back in those days (we had IRC, and then ICQ, but it wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as IM is today), and there was no “audit trail” for it like there is now. Today, if you dash off a quick IM dissing someone, you run the risk of that getting logged, forwarded, or shown to that person. It doesn’t take too many screw-ups to get shunned and learn not to do that again… or to learn to shun people who do.
So one possibility is that the Internet has made the world more like an old-fashioned, closely-knit, traditional community where everyone knows everyone. Have the kids learned to be more polite because getting along well with others has become a much more critical skill? Another possibility is that the Internet put us Americans more closely in contact with other cultures in other parts of the world who have maintained their more traditional moral standards, too.
However this cultural shift back to more traditional standards of manners and conduct has occurred, I consider it a very good thing. Old habits die hard, and I’ve always loved to complain (hence, a whole tag on this blog titled “bitch bitch bitch”), so I often make missteps in this new world (wasn’t I just hating on chubby girls wearing skirts too tight only one post ago?), so it takes consistent focus for me to stay on the new straight-and-narrow. But I think a world in which people simply don’t say anything disparaging about anyone else could be a much more pleasant world for everyone, so I’m glad to do the work to help keep it that way.
