Post-Internet Gossip

A relative came up to me at a family gathering and said Did you know that cousin so-in-so makes $$$$$ a year?

I wanted to take a shower—not because I had been perspiring in the summer heat but because I felt grimy from her gossip.

This was not her business to tell.

So I replied How do you know that—did so-in-so tell you directly?

I was hoping to shame the gossipmonger with my inquiry.

But she was not at all fazed. The relative simply responded No—he didn’t tell me. I looked it up online. All salaries for executives of public corporations are posted on the internet—their stock holdings and bonuses too.

I had no idea.

There was a time when people lacked easy access to other people’s affairs. One had to work hard to find out how much money someone made or the price they paid for their house or if they indeed had an educational degree in the area they claimed.

People had the ability to tweak reality for the sake of privacy, or the betterment of public relations, or for practical self-gain.

People formerly owned the breadth and gravity of their self-created spin.

Which has prompted me to recall something Sadie’s son—the writer-man who grew up in the large garden style cooperative apartment complex near my house in Yonkers and graduated from the local public high school once humorously wrote in an email:  I liked to mock-pretentiously say that Greystone was the estate where I was raised and Gorton [high school] was where I prepped. Well, it worked before the internet.

In every possible way --we were all different people before the internet.