I‘m sitting in a train car on my way from client meetings in Gothenburg. In front of me are four ladies gossiping away about all kinds of things. One of the topics is the annoying and superficial girlfriend of one lady’s son. Their discussion includes all kinds of details about her work, her habits, her name, her employer’s name, the boyfriend’s name and all kinds of other identifying details.
Now, this is not smart. Not when the girlfriend in question has a fairly large blog and several other passengers (like me) are sitting in the same car tapping away on laptops.
I happen to know who the girlfriend in question is. I don’t know her, but I know of her, and she’s definitely moving around in the same circles as I am.
If these ladies knew that I was sitting behind them blogging about them, they would probably not have been as mean when gossiping away about this girlfriend. In fact, they would probably have left out identifying and/or mean details altogether. They would perhaps have discussed her anyway, perhaps even criticized her, but they would not have been mean and judging.
I’ve written and talked before about how the new interpersonal transparency of our society should lead us all to a society of less evil. In my 25-year prediction-post that I wrote a few months ago I wrote this:
Gossip will become hugely more efficient in this transparent world of efficient communication. This will lead to vengeance and gratitude being distributed with much more precision in answer to bad or good behavior and will make us all behave better and cheat less.
I think that this is true.
But one thought that struck me here on the train is that perhaps the younger generation has a transparent world mindset as their default mode. That perhaps these older ladies have a default mindset calibrated to a more opaque world, and thus are less mindful of consequences of their gossip? Just a thought. Have to dig deeper into this.
And don’t worry – I won’t give away the name of the blogging girlfriend in question. 
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