Gossip Rocks Forum - Life and Living

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I couldn't have been more surprised to find Josh Harris in Ethiopia. In Manhattan in the mid-1990s, he had been "the Warhol of the Web" – one of the first internet multimillionaires, who took the $80m fortune he'd made and started to explore the possibilities and implications of this new technology, to the point of self-destruction. In the process, he became the focal point of the downtown New York scene that, for heady extravagance, rivalled anything from the 1960s or 1970s.

We Live in Public
Production year: 2009
Country: USA
Runtime: 89 mins
Directors: Ondi Timoner
More on this film
His Millennium Eve party, called Quiet: We Live in Public, ran for over a month, during which an ad-hoc community of human subjects lived in pods in a six-storey Broadway warehouse, each pod wired up and effectively functioning as a TV channel, streamed live to the web via Harris's online TV portal at Pseudo.com. It was 1,000 times more vital and acute than the still-nascent Big Brother. "Don't bring your money," Harris said. "Everything here is free."

Quiet featured a shooting range you could hear from the street, a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras. But more than anything, it offered its residents complete freedom. There were drugs and public sex – at one point, Harris, in the guise of a clown called Luvvy, attempted to coordinate simultaneous orgasms between three couples.

Just about anything that could happen did happen, and many people have called it an experiment. But Ondi Timoner, director of We Live in Public, a Sundance-winning documentary about Harris that opens in the UK next week, shrewdly calls it a metaphor. My feeling is that Harris wasn't saying, "This could happen" but "This will happen". This is where the technology is taking us; and what's more, it's where we want to go.

After Quiet, Josh carried on funding quirky art projects, throughout the dotcom crash and the collapse of Pseudo in September 2000. Then, at the end of that year, he announced his We Live in Public web project, for which he rigged up his opulent Broadway loft with dozens of cameras, committing himself and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin to "live in public" for 100 days.

The pressure was too much, and their relationship broke down, a blow that coincided with the last of his fortune flowing away on the stock market. He had a breakdown, and retreated to an apple farm he'd bought in upstate New York, to lick his wounds. He later returned to the web fray with a clever extension of the YouTube idea, called Operator 11; but within a year he had abandoned that, and simply disappeared. I tried every avenue I could think of, but no one knew where he was.

Then I got hold of an email address. A cautious exchange followed, including an invitation to travel to Ethiopia, his long-term home, to stay at a hotel down the road from his compound, or to sleep on his couch. I had to go. "Walking away from that last million was the hardest thing to do," Harris told me when we finally met, on the shores of Lake Awasa in the lush south of the country. "The others I didn't care about, but that one hurt."

He had asked me to bring him cigars ("my last remaining vice") and a tonne of books (Ken Follett, Tolstoy, Hemingway) along with shirts, a pair of aviator shades and loads of underpants. We developed a routine: we would get up and share breakfast, cooked by one of his three staff, then I would go off and explore, take notes for a book I wanted to write while he edited a film he had funded, about his friends going on a deep-sea fishing trip.

Then in the evening, we would share dinner, talk deep into the night, and watch one of the Muhammad Ali fights he'd asked me to bring. Outside, the hyenas, monkeys and wild dogs howled as I slept on the couch. One night a gun went off next door and the neighbourhood turned to bedlam, just as he'd been telling me that the FBI were following him, and that local gangsters were trying to tap him for money. (The last claim, at least, turned out to be true.)

Harris made his money as the founder of Jupiter Communications, the first web research firm. He told me about the day he sold part of it. He was sitting in a restaurant when $14m landed in his bank account. It was "one of the worst moments of my life". Suddenly, all he could do was worry about losing it. So he spent it on stuff he cared about, claiming to have always regarded Pseudo.com as an art project, which infuriated his former colleagues.

In fact, he spoke of Quiet as his masterwork, the event his whole life had been leading up to. "It took an essence out of your being," he said. "Everyone had a drug – the cocaine people, the pot people, the heroin people, the alcohol people, the attention people, the sex people, the relationship junkies. It's like you took the deepest part of hardcore downtown NY and you collectively blew their minds. It ran for five weeks, but it really, really worked for a week." Which week – the first? "No, the last week. It hit a groove and everyone forgot themselves. That was when we saw them."

For me, what makes Harris's story interesting is the fact that, although he was at the forefront of something big and new, he was not alone in any of this. At the start of the 1990s, New York was in deep recession. Half of the office space in Manhattan was empty. At the same time, the web was at the height of its utopian first phase, the focus of a counterculture thrilled by the idea of free, unmediated information exchange. Arts graduates – liberals, in other words – became what we would now call cyberpunks, founders of high-profile companies such as the web design consultancy Razorfish and online marketing firm Doubleclick, whose values ran to billions at the height of the dotcom mania.

The dark side of the bunker

There was a lot of money around, and it had to flow somewhere. Silicon Valley in California was dull as ditchwater, full of techies whose idea of a night out was the cafe at Fry's Electronics Superstore; but the "early true believers" of New York's Silicon Alley lived and spent colourfully. Pseudo's ever-more outlandish parties (at one point, Harris installed an entire boxing gym in his warehouse for after-hours revelling) attracted queues around the block.

Back in 1999, Timoner was a young film-maker who had heard about Harris and the scene from friends. When Harris decided he needed someone to capture Quiet on video, he called her. She admits to having mixed feelings about the darker side of what she saw in "the bunker". It was only later, when Facebook and YouTube took off, that she saw its significance.

In her film, she sees Harris as a warning of what our children might become, perpetually connected to millions but starved of intimate contact with a few. Curiously, Harris doesn't disagree with this, describing a childhood in which he drew most of his emotional sustenance from TV. Yet, for all that, I missed our evening sessions hugely when I returned from Awasa, and Timoner admits that she feels strong affection for him, too. He is what Malcolm Gladwell would call an "outlier", walking ahead in order to show us where we're going – and what we'll look like when we get there.

"Andy Warhol said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," Harris told me. "But I think he misunderstood what was happening. I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That's where we're heading, whether we like it or not."Tanya Corrinhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/04/josh-harris-we-live-public

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Can You Believe How Mean Office Gossip Can Be?
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: November 2, 2009

Could adults gossiping in the office be more devious than the teenagers in “Gossip Girl”?

What’s the gossip in your office? What’s the gossip doing to your office? And what are the best strategies for gossips or antigossips to employ in the office?

If you have a hard time believing this, then you must have skipped the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Perhaps you saw “ethnography” and assumed it would just be quaint reports from the Amazon and the South Seas. But this time enthnographers have returned from the field with footage of a truly savage native ritual: teachers at an elementary school in the Midwest dishing about their principal behind her back.

These are rare records of “gossip episodes,” which have been the subject of a long-running theoretical debate among anthropologists and sociologists. One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests.

But both schools have spent more time theorizing than observing gossipers in their natural habitats. Until now, their flow charts of gossips’ conversations (where would social science be without flow charts?) have been largely based on studies in informal settings, like the casual conversations recorded in a German housing project and in the cafeteria of an American middle school.

The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others.

Consider, for instance, the cascade of insults recorded in the earlier study of middle-school gossip by Donna Eder and Janet Lynne Enke of Indiana University. In this cafeteria conversation, a group of eighth-grade girls in the cafeteria were discussing an overweight classmate whose breasts they considered too large for her age:

Penny: In choir that girl was sitting in front of us and we kept going, “Moo.”

Karen: We were going, “Come here, cow; come here, cow.”

Bonnie: I know. She is one.

Penny: She looks like a big fat cow.

Julie: Who is that?

Bonnie: That girl on the basketball team.

Penny: That big red-headed cow.

Julie: Oh, yeah. I know. She is a cow.

The new study found that gossip in the workplace also tended to be overwhelmingly negative, but the insults were more subtle and the conversations less predictable, says Tim Hallett, a sociologist at Indiana University. Dr. Hallett conducted the study along with Dr. Eder and Brent Harger of Albright College.

“Office gossip can be a form of reputational warfare,” Dr. Hallett says. “It’s like informal gossip, but it’s richer and more elaborate. There are more layers to it because people practice indirectness and avoidance. People are more cautious because they know they can lose not just a friendship but a job.”

During his two years studying the group dynamics at a Midwestern elementary school, which allowed him access on condition of anonymity, Dr. Hallett found that the teachers became so comfortable with him and his camera that they would freely insult their bosses during one-on-one interviews. But at the teachers’ formal group meetings, where they knew that another teacher might report their insults to the principal, they were more discreet.

Instead of making direct criticisms, they sometimes offered obliquely sarcastic comments to test the waters. They used another indirect tactic categorized as praise the predecessor, as in the meeting when a teacher fondly recalled a previous administration: “It was so calm, and you could teach. No one was constantly looking over your shoulder.” The other teachers quickly agreed. No one explicitly called the current principal an authoritarian busybody, but that was the obvious implication.

Some teachers were especially adept at managing gossip. At one meeting, after someone complained about a student walking around with his hair shaped into horns (“Tell me, how is that part of the uniform dress code?”), the group began blaming the lapse in discipline on the assistant principal. The gossip seemed to be going down the same nasty track as the teenagers’ she’s-such-a-cow episode until another teacher, an ally of the assistant principal, smoothly intervened.

First, the teacher interrupted the attack by asking the name of the student with the horns. That deflected the group’s gossip on to the student’s academic difficulties and weird behavior (“He’s gotta frighten the little kids”). Then the teacher masterfully completed the rescue of the assistant principal by changing the topic entirely, reminding everyone of a different disciplinary issue that was the fault of a less popular administrator — the principal, who promptly became the new focus of the groups’ anger.

The teachers’ gossip never got as blatantly mean as the teenage girls’ — no one was ever called a cow — but in some ways the effects were more widely felt.

As teachers mocked the principal and complained about her being “stifling” and “hyper,” the atmosphere got more poisonous. The principal felt that her authority was being undermined by gossip and retaliated against teachers she suspected (correctly) of criticizing her. Teachers and administrators fled the school, and the students’ test scores declined.

“The gossip did serve to reinforce the teachers’ group solidarity, but in this case it was also a form of warfare that brought everyone down,” Dr. Hallett says. “It was reminiscent of the old saying that gossip is a three-pronged tongue: it can hurt the speaker and the listener, as well as the target.”

Some bosses have tried turning the office into a “no-gossip zone,” but Dr. Hallett says it is more realistic to try managing it. (If you have ideas for managing office gossip, you can suggest them at nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

If, say, an office rival seems poised to trash one of your absent allies, Dr. Hallett suggests you make a “pre-emptive positive evaluation.” A quick “Isn’t she doing a great job?” might be enough to stop the attack.

If your rival tries persisting with indirect sarcasm — “Oh, real great job” — you can force the issue by calmly asking what that means. That simple question, a dare made in a pleasant voice, often silenced the sarcastic gossips observed by Dr. Hallett.

And if that doesn’t work, Dr. Hallett suggests you try an even simpler tactic that was used successfully at the teachers’ meetings — and that is available in any workplace anytime. In fact, it’s one of the tactics that distinguishes office gossip from nonoffice gossip. When the going gets tough, when the gossip gets mean, you always have one reliable escape line: “Don’t we have some work to do here?”