Mistaking Relevance for Trivia
19 Jan 2007 in General by GarrickLast night, I had bad dream about attending a live recording of a radio program.
From what I can remember, the point of the show was to dismiss highly-personal communications as trivial while a panel of teen girls shared the melodramatic relationship unfolding within their MySpace pages.
While “trivia” (or gossip) might not be the most noble of messages to share, the vast majority of our gestures are just that. In Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language - Robin Dunbar posits that we talk for gossip. Gossip being as much about relationship as primates grooming each other.
I suspect gossip comes right after spam in volume of daily email. I don’t think this is bad - especially with good filters. Filters we don’t really have yet, filters that consider anything not relevant to me now as spam (”news”, “gossip”, “trivia”, and otherwise).
Not having those filter yet is mostly OK - because we don’t yet have the quantity of publishers that demand it. Tomorrow - when news/gossip/trivia is published block-by-block - we will.
