In Wells next the Sea, Larissa, who works in our shop, was dating the butcher’s apprentice [you should see the love bites on his neck]. The butcher is our next door neighbour, he appears affable but he runs the town council, so you don’t want to be on the wrong side of him. Last summer the bakery closed down suddenly for a month at the height of the season. Apparently the baker had run off with his boyfriend. The harbour master told me [in confidence of course] not to trust the chandler, John Crook, “crook by name crook by nature”. Very sociable I’d say.
Idle gossip, Lynching and witch hunts.
That’s why we all left the villages in the first place.
Social currency glues society together. Or blows it apart.
The internet is allowing us to recreate some of these old fashioned social conditions by allowing people to cooperate, gossip, share, and overhear, to tweak the curtains and peep at each other, and also to bully, intimidate and vilify.
Stars Wars kid “endures … harassment and derision from his high-school mates and the public at large” and “will be under psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time.” [from the lawsuit taken against his classmates who posted the clip online]. The clip is estimated to have been seen 900 million times.
See also ‘Dog Poop Girl’ in Korea who quit her university in shame after a prolonged internet hate campaign.