Girl, Gossip: Scandal as Town Forum in a Media Society

Laura Kipnis, in Against Love: A Polemic, writes:

“If experimentalism was once publicly possible and openly debated, if now such discussions are played out surreptitiously and behind closed doors, exposed to view only courtesy of scandal, does this make scandal a media society’s substitute for the town forum? Like town forums, scandals provide venues for staging social issues, for negotiating social boundaries and possibilities, for having ethical debates –”

Beautiful. I no longer feel dirty for getting a heart-on for gossip.

But hold up, wait a minute:

” — unlike town forums, the opportunity for sustained reflection is not incredibly high. Outrage substitutes for thought and vicariousness for social criticism, expose for principled discussion. None of this makes scandal a demonstration of enlightened or progressive thinking, and politically speaking the outcomes are unpredictable.”

In other words, yes, “Stars, they’re just like us!” is an undeniable contribution to civic discourse, but just because it does not so much harm to us, does it really do good by the citizenry, either?

(Once upon a winter in 1998, I kept a tally on my television: Cock. War. Clinton’s dick won by a landslide. Iraq? Well. We know how that continued.)