| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 社會學系 === 91 === In the modern society, the acquisition of information has become the new way to gain dominant position. In Taiwan, the gossip culture has been transformed from interpersonal communication topic to popular news on mass media. Gossip not only challenges the boundary between public and private realm but also provokes the debate between personal privacy and the right of information access. In the discipline of mass communication, the issue of gossip is examined from the ethical perspective. However, this study takes a sociological approach that adopts the social network analysis. A pre-selected concrete small group is used as a research sample to explore how gossip circulates in our daily interactions.
This thesis presents the results from the comparisons between the gossip network to the friendship network. They are demonstrated in the order of network structure, roles, proximity, interaction patterns, and the attitudes of the gossipy people. This study suggests that gossip is deeply rooted in the friendship relations. It further shows that the prominent actors in our daily life occupy an important position in the transmission of gossip, which corresponds to the hypothesis of social control theory. Additionally, the social distance within the gossip network is much more closer than that within the friendship network. Moreover, the gossip network is composed of a single -core structure with a star-shaped interaction pattern. This unique structure is formed by the frequent exchange of information and instant diffusion of gossip. Finally, various theories of the social functions of gossip are reexamined, and new understandings of these theories are provided in the end of this thesis.
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