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lectures > lectures spring 2002

Grooming, Gossip and the Mobile Phone

Speaker: Kate Fox
15th June 2002

Gossip is the human equivalent of 'social grooming' among apes and monkeys. Two thirds of all human conversation is gossip, because this 'grooming-talk' is essential to our social, psychological and possibly even physican well-being. In this lecture, a social anthropologist reveals the findings of recent research on the role of mobile phones in facilitating this vital therapeutic activity, showing how mobile phones have become the new garden fence or village green, a social lifeline in an alienating and fragmented modern world. Including findings on sex-differences in gossip styles, the use of mobiles as a 'symbolic bodyguard', the joy of text, teenage social skills and the benefits of negative gossip (with some digressions on cyber-dating and e-mail flirting), the talk explains how we are using space-age technology to return to stone-age communication patterns. (click here for her talk)

Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, is Co-Director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford.
Her work involves monitoring and assessing global sociocultural trends, and has included research, publications and broadcasts on many aspects of human behaviour, including: social aspects of drinking; health issues; six differences in risk-taking; body image; flirting and courtship; pub behaviour; horseracing; gossip; violence and disorder.
Kate is also a consultant on the prevention and management of violence, and has written and produced training programmes and videos on this subject.
Her most recent book is The Racing Tribe, a study of horseracing as a subculture, and she is currently writing a book on Englishness.

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