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When information becomes gossip

September 2026

I wanna share this article as a way to raise awareness about this so-called “gossips” and the profound negative impact in life with the arise of social media and short-format video content, as well as offline gossiping.

It’s been 2 months since my last article. I know, I’ve been quite busy. In my about page I specified that I’m on route towards my PhD. That’s a reality, despite not being part of a university yet. I’ll not go into details but journaling offline and studying my stuff demands me a lot of time. That’s great, being offline deliberately is kind of one of the things that has helped me a lot these months.

Today I wanna talk about something that it’s being misconfused a lot. Nowadays we are surrounded by a lot of information and hyper-connection tools that facilitate some of the things people used to do with anticipation in seconds. Mm, for example? Social media for instance, the ability to talk with your friends and to catch up with their things on their posts, comments, likes and stuff. This was not achiveable in (for example) 1981. In 1981, you had a newspaper, an Apple II, a home phone and some energy to go and talk face-to-face with some fellas without knowing if they were available or not. Social media opens an opportunity to connect with friends and with their friends as well. It’s like a tree: a friend of a friend of a friend… and goes on, or at least that was the original idea when social media arised in this society. Nowadays that’s just one solely part of a business foundation designed to be addictive and profitable.

I wanna emphasize this article has some opinions by me so don’t take them personal. If you agree or not, that’s your choice and I’m happy to entable a debate with you so I can learn from you and you can learn from me. But, when I had modern social media accounts, I observed some of the patterns these tools have, and the behaviour we tend to have once we see these patterns (because most of them are designed to trap our reward’s system).

Before talking about the differente between information and gossip, I wanna share some quotes and entry-level reflections about this article written by Helbert Simon, an american psychologist known to be one of the pioneers in information processing and organization theory, as well as problem solving. The quoted article was written in 1971 and it reflects in “an information-rich world” and it’s relationship with decision-making and how to potentially tackle this with a deliberated-business mindset.

Something captured my attention: “Human beings, like contemporary computers, are essentially serial devices. They can attend to only one thing at a time. This is just another way is of saying that attention is scarce. Even the modern time-sharing systems which John Kemeny described are really only doing one thing at a time, although they seem able to attend to one hundred things at once. They achieve this illusion by sharing their time and attention amongthese hundred things. The attention-capacity measure I am proposing forhuman beings applies as well to time-sharing systems and also to an organization employing many people, which can be viewed as a time-sharing system”. This has a lot to do with the information we have at the tip of our hands. The human mind has limited resources, it does not have the ability to be a “multi-tasker”, doing a lot of things at the same time with the same dedication and focus as you were doing with one thing probably. So, society lives in a world that has the knowledge at just 2 clicks but does not have the ability to pay attention to those things. That induces something: The more information we have, the less attention we put in that. We can’t put attention to all of this things at the same time and at the same pace. And Simon Helbert warned us about it in some way: in a world that has all the knowledge in our hand, the less things we are going to learn. And all this information, has some revenue on it.

Maybe I’m externalizing this fact into a broader topic that could be defined as the “attention economy” where our attention is the most valuable thing for businesses like Meta, Google and stuff (at the end of the day, that’s how they make money). The problem with this is that companies don’t care about the people’s mental health as long as they make enough money to justify hundreds of billions of dollars on AI’s datacenters and addictive algorithms. This specific article relates the difference between information we recieve on the internet and the potential filtered gossips in there that hijack our mind. Internet gossips (as well as local gossips) are part of this attention economy and, foremostly, of human psychology of this need to know what’s happening with our surroundings. At the end of the day, primitive minds are tribe minds.

We all know what’s a gossip. They are rumours (false or true) about the personal, public and private affairs of others (defined by wikipedia). Gossips are, in fact, words that can be or not taken for granted on someone. Gossips exist for a long time, even before the 16th century that the word was defined and they are present in a lot of things in modern life. For instance, how many times you, gently reader, find yourself in a position where you wanted to know more about what happened with your ex? Or, how many times your friends/colleagues told you something about someone (that you know of) they saw on social media and you were curious about it? Or, how many times a newspaper, a post in your X, IG or tiktok feed appeared about some news that pointed to a famous person/company and you wanted to know more and more and more?

There is a big difference between the knowing of something and transforming that into a gossip. Knowing that your friend has kids is a good fact. Transforming that into a gossip about your friend having kids (his feelings, his romances, his best and worst moments) and sharing it/them with people is not a good fact. The first one is some information about your friend, the other one is an augmented version of the first one designed to be addictive among peers, making them more desireful to know more about their kids, his wife, himself, etc etc etc… and they drain cognitive energy. Social media promotes the second one (gossips) so that’s how they retain people in order to make money (I’m sick of these platforms tbh)

Gossips in some way, demand some cognitive energy to interpret them in order to understand what’s happening and in consequence, react to it. Maybe your ex-friend got a job a Google and some other people told you he was doing pretty well (which that wasn’t the case) and that makes you jealous. How did they know that since they this ex-friend lives in USA and you live in Germany? Yup, social media. Or maybe friends that they learnt that from social media.

Like I said, it demands cognitive energy. Glucose. Like mental games in a date demand cognitive energy, gossips are carefully designed to be addictive. And since businesses knew this fact, they transformed them in a profitable business, showing you gossips on the internet right in front of your screen so they can make more money every day.

To denote this, I wanna clarify 2 types of gossips according to my personal experience:

1. Local gossips: Information obtained about someone/something by people we know by chatting, talking or observing it on a social media feed. In my personal experience, this is when you are constantly swiping your friends’ IG stories in order to find something interesting. It is the same mechanism as a slot machine, you don’t really know what story will show up next. That’s how gossips are being built. You are wasting glucose in order to interpret a photo some girl you know posted on an IG story so you can spend all day figuring out if that was an hint or no. Or, someone screenshoted a photo of a close friend visiting Los Cabos, Mexico, then that someone send it to you, you see it, you realize you didn’t know your friend was on a trip that and that makes you quite sad. I don’t know, there are a lot of examples out there. But whatever the case, it is not really our business.

2. Global gossips: Information obtained about someone/something it’s not related to any of known friends or has nothing to do with the things we do (or maybe yes, but it is something you can’t control). Examples? Famous people marrying each other, or augmented versions companies’ decisions, like the last recent announcement about Sony ditching physical media in Playstation and reaction in social media (I’m against that and I applaud what people did instead, reclaiming ownership). But I asked myself something: “Q: Do I have a Playstation? A: No. I don’t have one Q: Ok, so it’s good to know what Sony is doing but, why are you spending 2h of your time watching YT videos about Sony ditching physical media even though you already know that? A: Mmmm..”. Exactly. This type of gossip has a relationship with the so-called “mediatic fatigue” where you feel drained and anxious about something that’s happening in real life because you are either consuming more and more information and not taking actions above them or, the dunning-krueger effect is on (a cognitive bias in which people overestimate their abilies or knowledge, “the more you think you know, the less you actually know”) and you feel you know all the answers to respond arguments/debates when that’s not the case.

Despite the case whatsoever, both type of gossips are drainful. Like I said, it is not the same about knowing your friend has a kid and making that knowing into a gossip where people shared an augmented version of it designed to be addictive. In social media, this so-called clickbait articles or videos about some famous or influencer are, as you guessed, designed to be addictive and drainful.

And I also wanna take a moment to share what the Bible has to say about gossips:

“A perverse person stirs up conflict, and a gossip separates close friends.” Proverbs 16:28

“For I am afraid that when I come I may not find you as I want you to be, and you may not find me as you want me to be. I fear that there may be discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, slander, gossip, arrogance and disorder.” 2 Corinthians 12:20

“Do not spread false reports. Do not help a guilty person by being a malicious witness.” Exodus 23:1

“A gossip betrays a confidence; so avoid anyone who talks too much.” Proverbs 20:19

Maybe you believe in God, maybe not. I share some verses cuz I do believe in God and God has a lot of things to share with us. Despite the case you believe or you don’t, don’t take for granted the message I wanna say: Gossips are an augmented version of the reality itself designed to drain our soul, our minds and our attention, making it easier for companies to make more revenue every quarter. And making it harder for us to accomplish our goals.

My advice? First of all, read this article without AI, without distractions, with your own judgement and ask yourself: “Is this information I’m seeing right know helping me? Or is it draining me?”. Don’t just read it and go through your feed again. Question what I wrote, learn what habits you have to know what’s happening with your friends, colleages or with companies and ask yourself if that’s really worth it. If it is, ask yourself if that’s draining your mind or not. Actions speak for themselves. As for me, I changed my whole architecture of what I see (and unsee information), as well as my core habits. Now some of them are already funded with consistency. I wrote an article about a digital detox I’m doing and since then, I really deleted my whole modern social media. I wrote in that article I had an IG account which is now eliminated. I recently ditched youtube as well, I’m taking a break of it since most of the videos YT shows are recommendations from an algorithm. I also ditched most LLMs out there (I had ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Gemini… damn) in favor of offline stuff. LLMs has a very particular history in my life. On Dec 5th 2022, I remember my very first contact with ChatGPT and I tweeted (yup, was still Twitter) “ChatGPT is the next Google” and I was pretty amazed about how capable were these tools. Nowadays, it is a different world, these tools are now trained with private data and the harvesting global damage they are doing to the world in order to maintain their empires (you can read an article about it here) and some actions I took (and probably some of you guys too) to act in consequence. Note that I’m informing with actual facts that experts wrote, not gossiping. Gossiping could be something like “AI is going to dominate the world by 2030 and your job (and you) will be cooked” and slop like that.

Take some action, read deliberately, stay informed. If you know your ex has now a boyfriend/girlfriend, take that as a fact (and then continue with your life) and not as a gossip to share with people. If you know some company ditched a well-known service, take that as a fact to act in consequence, not as a gossip to share hate on X. Act, don’t react. Think, don’t be dominated by impulses.

Stay strong.

Pd. I don’t know when my next article is going to be posted (since I really invest some time offline and studying/applying for postgraduate and master calls but I’ll be consistently since this is a project I trully love. Some technical articles about science are coming up so stay tuned.)