It’s no secret – to anyone, really, but especially to those of you who’ve been around these parts for a while – that I’ve long been unable to look away from Tattle, the gossip site where people can vent their ire at “public figures”, all behind the safety of a computer screen and an anonymized username.
I was asked by journalist Aoife Barry, for a piece in the Sunday Times, which was published yesterday, for my thoughts on the forum, and because I, too, am a journalist, I kept a copy of my responses, which I thought I’d share with you below.
You can read the article here – and it’s well worth a read, with insights from a few different people on the concept of “trolling” and the validity of Tattle, although, notably, the voices missing are those of the people – mostly women – who themselves spend their days posting on the site.
For what it’s worth: I think it’s quite natural to have critical, even judgmental thoughts, about other people. I think, as women, we are conditioned to view one another as competition – after all, there’s only ever room for one woman in any given boardroom, if even that – and gossip forums are an inevitable result of that sense of competitiveness and the kind of disgruntlement we feel when we see someone else “succeed” (inverted commas because what is success, in this TED talk I will…) despite the fact that they are, objectively, no better / smarter / more talented than we are.
But I do think the internet has allowed us to get carried away with those expressions of ire, disgruntlement, sometimes even valid critique. So, because of course I do, I have a lot of thoughts on the subject.
Here are Aoife’s questions, and my – sometimes very rambling – answers.
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