Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ulukütük
In this article, I would like to examine history, story, and gossip through their differences, relationships, and interconnections. I will proceed by offering possible answers to hypothetical questions that emerge within the flow of consciousness. I will attempt to read what distinguishes history from gossip within a hermeneutic horizon centered on meaning and interpretation. In doing so, I will try, at least to some extent, to approach both history and gossip not as objects of epistemology and science, but as matters of understanding and interpretation.
Biologically speaking, a human being is not yet a social being at the moment of birth; what transforms a human being into a social being is the web of meaning into which they are born: names, stories, gossip, memories, prohibitions, praises, shame, and fears. Amidst all these, a human being acquires personality and identity; human social existence is established not in monological solitude but within a continuous circulation of speech. In ancient societies, a person’s reputation possessed a far more decisive value than today’s modern legal identities. This is because, in small-scale communities, a person’s life largely depended on the judgments formed about them. Who was trustworthy, who was dangerous, who was honorable, and who was a traitor was often determined not by official documents but by shared judgments. It is here that gossip emerges as the unofficial memory of society. From an anthropological perspective, gossip is not merely a vehicle of individual curiosity but also an instrument of communal order. When people talk about others, they are in fact drawing an invisible moral map. Who has crossed the line, which behaviors are acceptable, and which attitudes will be excluded are often determined through gossip. Thus, gossip functions like a primitive form of law: it is unwritten, yet more effective than writing; it is uninstitutionalized, yet it keeps societies in line. At this point, I would particularly like to mention something that I find extremely striking. People are often afraid not of punishment, but of being talked about. The saying, “Better to lose your life than your reputation,” was not coined in vain. For a human being, social death can be as devastating as biological death, and in some cases even more severe. We may say that gossip is an invisible mechanism of power that disciplines not only human behavior but also imagination, desires, and fears.
Human beings are narrative beings; or, to put it more precisely, human beings are beings who think through narration.For, as Paul Ricoeur emphasizes in Memory, History, Forgetting and Time and Narrative, the human relationship with truth is not direct, naked, or unmediated; it is always constructed through layers of language, representation, imagination, memory, and interpretation. The world of human beings is not a world of objects but a world of narratives. Human beings open their eyes to nature, yet they enter life within narratives. They are called by a name, placed within a story, added to a memory, and ultimately become bearers of other narratives. The history of human communities is, at the same time, the history of forms of narrative. From this perspective, it may be said that there exists a deeper hermeneutic kinship among gossip, story, rhetoric, and history, beyond the distinctions that appear at first glance. For all these structures are, ultimately, different manifestations of humanity’s attempt to make sense of what happens. In other words, each of them grasps reality not merely as “something that has happened,” but as an interpreted event. Consequently, the difference between gossip and history is not an epistemological difference, but a rhetorical, ontological, and hermeneutic one. Human beings do not merely experience what happens; they render it narratable. This is directly related to the fact that human beings are immanent in time. For human beings, time is not merely a physical flow but a continuity that is remembered, anticipated, and interpreted. Human beings construct the past through memory, the future through imagination, and the present through narrative. Narrative is an ontological form of defense that human beings have developed against time. Bare facts are not enough for human beings; they live not so much by the question, “What happened?” as by the question, “What is the meaning of what has happened?” This is where the story emerges. For, as Walter Benjamin states in The Storyteller, a story is an attempt to place events within a meaningful whole. Rather than simply arranging events one after another, it renders them interconnected, and in doing so, transforms fragmented experience into a world that is both comprehensible and narratable.
If the past no longer exists, then with what exactly does the historian establish a relationship? This question reveals not only the methodological but also the ontological crisis of history. For the historian’s subject matter is indeed paradoxical in nature, since it concerns something that is no longer present. As Giorgio Agamben discusses in Childhood and History: On the Destruction of Experience, the past is no longer “there”; it cannot be touched, relived, or directly experienced. Therefore, what the historian relates to is not the past itself, but the signs and traces that remain from it: documents, graves, inscriptions, rumors, chronicles, testimonies, architectural remains, rituals, legends, state archives, poems, and silence. A trace is not the past itself; it is the mark left by absence. Historiography deals not directly with truth, but with the remnants of truth. This is precisely what Carlo Ginzburg has sought to do and demonstrate throughout his historical works, especially in The Cheese and the Worms. The historian is one who listens attentively to the voice of a lost world and strives to hear it. For this reason, history is not merely an epistemological undertaking, but a hermeneutic one. The historian seeks to make speak once again a time, a place, and people who are no longer here and who have fallen silent. But the past does not speak; it is the historian who speaks, and it is the historian who makes the past speak. It is the historian who translates the language of the past into the language of the present. It is the historian who brings what happened then into the present and strives to translate it into the language of the here and now for those who seek to understand it. What we call history is not the past itself, but the horizon—the field of interpretation—that emerges from the encounter between the past and the present. Interpretation is a question-and-answer dialectic. As the historian’s questions change, history—that is, interpretations—changes as well. Whatever questions you ask of the past, you will receive answers accordingly. Every question carries its answer within itself. No historian approaches the past with a blank mind (tabula rasa); every historian carries into the past the fears, concepts, crises, and hopes of their own age. As Abdelfattah Kilito writes in his magnificent book The Arabs and the Art of Storytelling: A Strange Familiarity, the stories a society tells are the most honest confessions of its fears. For this reason, history is not a neutral representation of what has happened; it is the organized response to the questions that the present directs toward the past.
But does a human being truly “remember” the past, or do they constantly reconstruct it? Modern consciousness often conceives of memory as a passive storage space. Yet memory is not a mechanical recording system; human beings do not preserve the past in their memory exactly as it was, but continuously reinterpret it. What we call remembering, as Enzo Traverso points out in A Guide to Using the Past, is not the exact recall of what has happened, but its reorganization in accordance with the needs of the present. This is precisely why it is no coincidence that a society interprets (remembers) the same historical event differently in different periods. For, as Jan Assmann emphasizes in Cultural Memory: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Identity in Ancient High Cultures, societies remember the past not as it actually was, but in the form they need today. In this act of remembering, victories are magnified, traumas are transformed, defeats are forgotten, and heroes are invented. In fact, memory is not merely an act of remembering, but also an act of selection and exclusion. Perhaps what we call memory is nothing other than a form of forgetting. Memory decides what will be forgotten, and deciding what will be forgotten is, in a sense, deciding what will be remembered; thus, forgetting is also a form of remembering.
At this point, the following question arises: Is what we call history the preservation of truth, or the disciplined form of forgetting? For history is a discipline that records, filters, excludes, conceals, and obscures. No history can tell everything. Every narrative must choose one among many narratives, and to choose is necessarily to exclude another. History is concerned with what is hidden as much as with what is apparent; what historians silence is as much a part of history as what they narrate. As John Lukacs notes in Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past, history is not limited to the recorded past; the remembered past is also part of history. The historian may silence the past, but the remembered past cannot be silenced. Indeed, at times, what historians silence may be more important than what they narrate.
For there have always been close ties among history, knowledge, and power. Accordingly, power determines not only what can be spoken of, but also what cannot be spoken of. Under the shadow of power, it is possible for certain social traumas to be excluded from history for long periods, for certain peoples to be rendered invisible, for certain defeats to be suppressed, or for certain forms of violence to be normalized. Here, history becomes more than memory; it becomes an instrument of forgetting in a particular manner and to a particular extent. Consequently, history has never been merely the knowledge of bare facts; rather, it is the knowledge of selected facts.
An event does not become historical simply because it has occurred. Countless events take place and disappear. What enters history is that which can be incorporated into a narrative; an event enters history not as it happened, but as it can be narrated. Narrative always stands at the center. It transforms scattered events into a meaningful whole. It produces beginnings, turning points, heroes, betrayals, rises, and collapses.
Yet it is precisely for this reason that the boundary between history and literature is never absolute. As Richard J. Evans clearly explains in In Defence of History, the historian is certainly not a novelist. Nevertheless, the historian’s need to connect events, establish causality, create emphasis, and construct a structure of meaning inevitably gives history a narrative character.
Human beings cannot live by bare facts; they seek meaning. History is the organization of this need for meaning on the scale of civilization. Therefore, every act of writing history necessarily entails the exclusion of other possibilities. The moment a historical narrative is established, other narratives fall silent. The moment a center is established, the periphery becomes invisible. The moment an official memory is formed, alternative memories become marginalized.
As Sarah Maza underlines in Thinking About History: The Changing Shapes of the Past, history does not merely produce knowledge; it also produces legitimacy. Nations, empires, ideologies, and civilizations largely construct themselves through historical narratives.
Is history truly the memory of humanity, or is it the ideological organization of memory? It is probably both at once. For human communities cannot survive without a past. Those who have no past have no present, and those who have no present have no future. As Paul Connerton strikingly states in How Societies Remember, the past is the metaphysical backbone of social belonging: a society is what it remembers. Yet, at the same time, no society remembers its past in an entirely impartial manner. As Faruk Karaaslan emphasizes in Social Memory: The Sociology of Remembering and Forgetting, memory is always organized within a particular order through holidays, monuments, museums, textbooks, anthems, official ceremonies, and days of mourning. All of these are ritualized forms of social memory. Therefore, history does not merely narrate what has happened; it also teaches how it ought to be remembered. For this reason, history is not only the memory of humanity but also the politicized form of memory.
However, it would be incorrect to derive a crude relativism from this. The narrative character of history does not mean that all narratives are equal. For a hermeneutics based on narrative does not imply arbitrariness. The historian’s responsibility reveals itself precisely here: in doing justice to what has been silenced, preserving the balance between evidence and interpretation, and recognizing the ideological blind spots of one’s own age. As Beatriz Sarlo rightly states in Time Past: Culture of Memory and a Discussion on the Return to the Subject, “True historiography is not about seizing the past, but about developing epistemological humility before it, for the past is never entirely ours.” As human beings, our only tragedy is that while trying to understand our past, we inevitably intermingle it with our own voices, emotions, ambitions, hopes, and fears.
Returning to the question of gossip, why does gossip display such continuity within human communities? Because gossip touches upon not an accidental but an essential aspect of human beings. Human beings are not merely biological creatures; they are also symbolic beings who live through the exchange of meaning with others. For this reason, human communities sustain their existence not only through production, security, or law, but also through speech, narratives, implication, representation, and shared judgments. The continuity of gossip arises precisely from this: Human beings are beings who are spoken about and who constitute themselves by speaking about others.
The point that must be emphasized here is that gossip is not merely a low-level form of conversation, as the modern world assumes. On the contrary, gossip is one of the invisible systems of circulation within human communities. When we look at the society in which we live, we see that society does not function solely through official institutions; it also operates through informal networks of opinion. Who is considered trustworthy, which family is regarded as reputable, which place is deemed unsafe, or which event will become part of social memory is often determined through the circulation of gossip.
Why are human beings inclined to believe unverified narratives? The human relationship with truth is not merely logical but existential. Human beings seek accurate knowledge and wish to escape uncertainty/ambiguity (not vagueness, for ambiguity breeds confusion, whereas vagueness gives rise to creativity). Uncertainty, however, produces an ontological and existential unease in the human mind. The unknown disturbs human beings not only epistemologically but also metaphysically. As Bernard Williams writes in Truth and Truthfulness, human beings are often inclined to gravitate not toward absolute truth, but toward meaningful and coherent explanations—even narratives. (pp. 289–296)
The fact that a narrative remains unverified does not mean that it will be ineffective. This is because the human mind often responds more readily to narrative coherence than to empirical certainty. If a narrative touches upon human fears, desires, historical memory, or a sense of belonging, it may enter circulation despite its epistemological shortcomings. Contrary to what modern rationalism frequently claims, human beings are not only beings who know, but also beings who want to believe, want to love, and want to understand. It is for this reason that gossip is nourished not by ignorance, but by the need for meaning.
Is gossip merely a deficiency of information, or is it a consequence of humanity’s hunger for meaning? I believe the latter is the more plausible possibility. The fundamental concern of human beings is not merely to collect data or gain access to documents. Rather, human beings strive to place events within a meaningful whole and to construct a mental cosmos in the face of life’s disorder and fragmentation. This is precisely the point of origin of gossip as a form of narrative that does not merely transmit events, but interprets them and places them within a web of meaning. Therefore, gossip is not “idle talk” or mere chatter, as it is disparagingly described in the language of modern epistemology. On the contrary, it is one of the uncontrolled yet creative forms of humanity’s production of meaning. Human beings create narratives around what they do not know, because narrative fills the ontological void created by the unknown and enables individuals to find themselves within a meaningful whole.
In his Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun states: “As for reports concerning events, in order for such reports to be accurate and sound, it is essential to consider their conformity with the actual occurrence. Therefore, in such matters, it is necessary to examine whether what is reported could indeed have taken place.” (Muqaddimah, translated by Süleyman Uludağ, Vol. I, p. 203)
So then, what makes a rumor effective: its truthfulness or its power of circulation? In my view, it is most often its power of circulation. For social reality is not constructed solely through verified information; it is also imagined through repeated narratives. In human communities, the constant repetition of something causes it to be perceived as truth and, consequently, to produce the effect of truth. Repetition is the most powerful constitutive element of social memory. Many narratives, even if they cannot be fully verified historically, may exert an extraordinarily powerful influence on social reality through repetition. Human beings often place greater trust in and attach greater belief to the intensity of a narrative’s circulation than to its truthfulness. Something that is constantly repeated gradually comes to be regarded as “likely to have happened.”
In the modern age, the media and social networks have accelerated this mechanism many times over. For in the digital age, the classical balance between truth and circulation has been disrupted. The value of a narrative is now measured, more often than not, not by its epistemological soundness but by its capacity for viral circulation. This is one of the principal reasons why modern human beings have fallen into a crisis of truth.
Do human beings seek truth, or do they seek what can be narrated? It seems that human beings can grasp or accept truth only to the extent that it becomes narratable. For the human mind does not relate to bare facts, but to events that have been endowed with meaning. Even humanity’s search for truth takes place within narrative forms. Yet what is narratable is not identical with what is true, and the human mind is more readily drawn to dramatic, intense, emotional, and symbolic narratives. Truth is often ineffective because of its simplicity, whereas narrative becomes powerful because it is striking and compelling. Strangely enough, human beings sometimes desire not truth itself, but its dramatized form. As a result, in the modern world, truth is becoming increasingly rhetorical, while rhetoric is gradually taking the place of truth. We tend to prefer what is effective over what is true, and what is captivating over what is genuine. But when the boundary between truth and genuineness on the one hand, and effectiveness and captivation on the other, is already so ambiguous, can we truly know, in the fullest sense, why we prefer one over the other?
Why are societies more interested in unofficial accounts than in official statements? Because official discourse is often aimed at preserving the existing order, whereas unofficial narratives claim to reveal and disclose what remains unseen. The human mind likes to believe that something is being concealed, for hidden knowledge evokes a stronger sense—or effect—of truth than ordinary knowledge. What is at stake here is the desire for an “implicit truth,” because people often believe that official explanations are incomplete and are curious about narratives that reveal what lies behind the scenes. Gossip, in turn, constitutes an alternative field of interpretation against the official order of truth. When we look at the historical process, this phenomenon is particularly evident in pre-modern societies. For in periods when centralized mechanisms of information were weak, people made sense of the world largely through oral circulation.
Can gossip be interpreted as the “unofficial epistemology” of pre-modern societies? In my view, it is the unofficial epistemology of both pre-modern and modern societies. This is because, especially in pre-modern societies, knowledge was transmitted not only through written texts, but also through rumors, legends, folk narratives, oral traditions, and collective memory. People came to know the world largely through narratives. If we understand “epistemology” not merely as scientific verification, but as the mode through which social knowledge circulates, what is meant here becomes clearer. From this perspective, gossip is society’s invisible network of knowledge circulation. Who is considered trustworthy, which road is regarded as dangerous, which place is accepted as sacred, or which political actor is perceived as a threat is shaped, to a large extent, through this unofficial epistemology.
Gossip is not an irrational excess in the modern sense; rather, it is one of the historical forms of knowledge organization within human communities. Could gossip be a means not so much of producing knowledge as of producing social belonging? Perhaps this is, in fact, its primary function. People often engage in gossip not to acquire information, but to converse together, socialize, and share things with one another. A shared narrative produces a common sense of belonging; people who speak together about someone construct an invisible sense of “we.” Gossip involves more than the exchange of information—it is the sharing of meaning and narrative. Gossip does not dissolve social bonds; on the contrary, it produces them. Every community constructs its internal communication, its symbolic boundaries, and its collective memory through such narratives. Who belongs inside, and who remains outside? Who is acceptable, and who is not? Who is regarded as “one of us”? These distinctions are often determined not through official law, but through the circulation of gossip.
Therefore, as Peter Brooks points out in Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, gossip is not only the unofficial epistemology of societies but also a sociological phenomenon. (pp. 35–50) Perhaps this is why human communities can never completely dispense with gossip. When they do, their social bonds begin to weaken rapidly and perhaps even disappear altogether. For gossip produces intimacy. When a person speaks about someone else, they are in fact speaking from within a world of their own, and what they are really speaking about is themselves. Do not be misled by the claim that human beings seek truth. They may say that they seek truth, yet what often holds them together is not truth itself but shared narratives—the very foundations upon which understanding rises from narrative.
Human beings are in need of narratives, and history acquires meaning only when it becomes a narrative. If history requires narrative, then where exactly does the boundary between historiography and literature lie? In my view, this boundary is not as clear-cut as is commonly assumed. As John Lewis Gaddis points out in The Historical Landscape: How Historians Map the Past, historians, like novelists, establish connections among scattered events, determine beginnings and endings, create moments of dramatic intensity, bring certain characters to the forefront, magnify some events, and pass over others. The human mind grasps not fragmented facts but meaningful wholes. For this reason, history is inevitably in need of a narrative form.
According to Gaddis, historians are the “cartographers of the past,” striving to make sense of realities that cannot be confined within a laboratory. Like the solitary wanderer in Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting, they gaze through the mist upon a vast landscape of the past. Rather than adhering to the rigid formulas of the social sciences, they draw closer to the methods of geology, astronomy, and evolutionary biology, reconstructing the past from its remnants.
Yet the fundamental difference between history and literature emerges at the boundary of imagination. The novelist constructs the possible, whereas the historian must limit the realm of possible interpretation by the evidence. Even so, this distinction is not absolute. For the language historians use, the concepts they choose, and the manner in which they connect events prevent historiography from being entirely neutral.
As Hayden White points out in Metahistory, historiography is not merely the collection and arrangement of data; it is also “emplotment”—that is, the act of turning events into stories. The human mind does not think in terms of chronology, but through dramatic patterns. Every historical narrative necessarily produces a dramatic structure. For human beings can grasp time only through conflict. It is nearly impossible to construct a historical narrative without rises, collapses, betrayals, acts of heroism, and crises.
Historical narrative places scattered events within a dramatic flow. For this reason, there is often an invisible kinship between the language of history books and the language of epics. After all, can history truly be narrated without heroes, betrayals, rises, and collapses? I do not think so. For the human mind thinks more readily through persons than through abstract processes. The complex transformations of civilizations are often reduced to the will of a single hero. In this way, history becomes comprehensible; yet such comprehensibility is often reductionist.
The statement, “Fatih conquered Istanbul,” condenses thousands of military, economic, technological, and historical processes into a single will. The human mind seeks to simplify complexity, and the hero thus becomes the symbolic focal point of historical processes. Narratives of betrayal perform the same function. Communities often prefer to explain their failures through the figure of the “betraying subject” rather than through structural causes, so that history may become psychologically bearable.
Where there is a story, there is also rhetoric; no narrative can ever be entirely neutral. Every narrative constructs a structure of emphasis: it brings certain things to the fore while pushing others into the background. Rhetoric is not merely ornamental speech; it is the ordering power that determines the manner in which truth appears. This is why, in ancient thought, eloquence/rhetoric was regarded not merely as an aesthetic issue, but also as an epistemological one. For human beings often grasp truth not as it is, but as it is presented to them. (Tayfun Erdoğdu’s article, “The Problematic of Reality (réalité) and Truth (vérité) in Historiography,” is essential reading on this subject.)
From this perspective, gossip, story, rhetoric, and history are not entirely separate, distinct, or opposing domains. All of them are simply different ways through which human beings transform an event into a narrative. One of the greatest misconceptions of the modern mind is to regard gossip merely as a moral weakness. Yet gossip is one of the oldest mechanisms of interpretation within human communities. Gossip is discourse about absence; it is the production of a narrative about a person when that person is not present.
Is rhetoric an instrument that renders truth visible, or a veil that conceals it? It can be both. Rhetoric is, in itself, neither the enemy nor the guarantor of truth. For human beings do not arrive at truth directly, but through language. Language, however, is not merely a neutral medium; it produces emphasis, rhythm, symbols, and associations. The problem is not the existence of rhetoric, but the fact that rhetoric comes to take the place of truth.
Why does power operate not only through institutions but also through rumors? Because power seeks to govern not only bodies but also the imagination. Institutions may regulate behavior, but rumors shape perceptions. Human communities are governed not only through law, but also through opinion. For this reason, no power can sustain itself solely through legal apparatuses; it also requires an invisible circulation of narratives.
Modern political theories have often mistakenly conceived power primarily in terms of the state, law, the economy, or institutions. Yet one of the oldest forms of power within human communities is speech itself. People govern one another not only by making laws, but also by speaking about others. In this respect, gossip is the mode through which micro-powers circulate.
In a neighborhood, within a family, among members of a religious order, in an academic community, or within a political group, what people say about one another forms an invisible network of surveillance and control. According to one of the everyday manifestations of the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, people exercise self-control not only because they are being watched, but also because they know they will be talked about.
But gossip does not merely regulate the individual; it also produces a sense of “we.” And every “we,” more often than not, gives rise to a “they.” Gossip is one of the oldest instruments through which these boundaries are drawn.
So, where does the boundary lie between collective memory and collective paranoia? This boundary emerges at the point where memory loses its function of preserving truth and begins instead to produce perpetual threats. As Maurice Halbwachs states in Collective Memory, collective memory is the relationship of continuity that a society establishes with its past. Human communities cannot live without a past, for the past is like the metaphysical foundation of belonging. However, when memory begins to produce trauma incessantly, the past ceases to be a source of meaning and turns into a mechanism of psychological siege.
What we call collective paranoia is a condition in which a society keeps its historical traumas permanently alive and, as a result, constantly perceives itself to be under threat. (As is the case, at present, among Zionists in the country now called Israel.) In such situations, the past ceases to be a memory that explains the present and becomes instead a regime of fear that holds the present hostage. A consciousness that seeks a hidden perpetrator behind every event ceases to be a conscious subject and turns into a paranoid monster.
The stories that a society tells reveal that society’s fears. For narratives carry not only conscious ideologies but also the collective unconscious. Whatever stories a society repeats incessantly, it simultaneously reveals the anxieties with which it lives. Societies that constantly produce narratives of “betrayal” suffer from a crisis of trust; societies that continuously produce narratives of a “golden age” are dissatisfied with the present; and societies that constantly construct narratives of “decline” carry a metaphysical hopelessness regarding the future.
As İsmail Gezgin explains in Homo Narrans: Why Do Human Beings Tell Stories? The Archaeology of Myth, Fairy Tale, and Story, the stories of civilizations are like maps of their souls. Myths, epics, heroic narratives, and collective traumas are not merely narratives of the past; they are expressions of collective psychology. Myths are the linguistic reflections in human beings of their interaction with the environment as a part of nature; they are the stories of humanity’s attempt to establish dominion over nature. In this sense, myths are the building blocks that human beings themselves create and use in the construction of their own selves. The answer to the question “What is a human being?” is the sum total of these narratives. Human beings are their own narratives; their bodies, worlds, lives, and cultures find existence both in the myths and tales they create and in those in which they themselves play a role.
In the modern age, this situation has become even more complex. The transformation of everyone into a narrator of history in the age of social media has also fragmented the epistemological authority of history. Today, the digital environment has decentralized historiography: every individual is now not only a consumer of information, but also a producer of narratives. This development has had a twofold consequence. On the one hand, historical plurality has increased; silenced communities, suppressed memories, and alternative narratives have become visible. This is undoubtedly a positive development, because history is ceasing to be solely the voice of those in power.
On the other hand, however, the epistemological crisis has deepened. For the democratization of narrative production does not mean that truth itself has become democratized. On the contrary, the weakening of mechanisms of verification has blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction. In the age of social media, everyone becoming a narrator of history also means the fragmentation of history itself; the common ground of truth is gradually shrinking.
Has the digital age democratized gossip, or has it totalized it? In my view, it has done both, although the latter possibility is becoming increasingly dominant. Indeed, the digital age initially made access to information easier and more widespread. Centralized monopolies over information were broken, and people became able to reach alternative narratives. In this sense, gossip was democratized; that is, everyone became capable of participating in its circulation.
Yet, over time, something else happened as well. Gossip ceased to be a local social activity and transformed into a global system of circulation. In the past, rumors spread within particular communities; today, algorithms amplify them on a global scale. From this perspective, gossip has not only become democratized but also totalized. Human beings now live under the constant bombardment of circulating narratives. New crises, conspiracy theories, fears, public shaming campaigns, and dramatic stories are being produced at every moment. This situation keeps the human mind in a state of perpetual stimulation.
In such a condition, modern human beings cannot help but ask themselves: Am I really living in an information society, or in a society of rumors? I would argue that the greatest illusion of those who claim to live in an information society is to mistake the density of data for knowledge. Today, human beings are exposed to more information than at any other period in history, yet this does not automatically produce a wiser consciousness. Knowledge is not merely the accumulation of data; it is the activity of selecting, arranging, making sense of, and establishing a relationship with truth.
The modern digital order, however, erodes the depth of thought, exhausts curiosity, and fragments attention by exposing human beings to a constant flow of information. Human beings no longer truly know; more often, they merely participate in circulation. For this reason, modern humanity lives not so much in an “information society” as in a “society of perpetual circulation.” Here, truth has been replaced by exposure. The value of a narrative is measured less by its truthfulness than by its capacity for circulation. Algorithmic systems appeal not to humanity’s search for truth, but to the economy of attention.
Thus, in the modern age, gossip has ceased to be a primitive remnant and has become one of the fundamental modes of circulation of digital civilization. As Byung-Chul Han states in The Crisis of Narration, humanity is, for the first time, speaking so much while understanding so little, becoming ever more visible while simultaneously fading away, sharing more than ever while diminishing itself to the same extent.
Heidegger speaks of the concept of “das Man.” According to Heidegger, everyday human existence is often inauthentic: people think as everyone else thinks and speak as everyone else speaks, while circulating opinions take the place of truth. Nevertheless, Heidegger does not use what he calls “Gerede” (idle talk) in a crude or dismissive sense. On the contrary, idle talk or gossip “indicates a positive phenomenon that constitutes understanding and interpretation as one of the modes of Being of everyday Dasein. Discourse mostly expresses itself and has, indeed, always already expressed itself. Discourse is language. Likewise, understanding and interpretation are always present within what is expressed.”
Heidegger also states that human beings are “thrown” into the world; that is, they find themselves already situated within pre-established horizons of meaning. Language, history, tradition, and civilization exist prior to human thought. Therefore, the human relationship with truth is not immediate but hermeneutic.
Yet human beings are not merely relativistic creatures lost among narratives. As Gadamer points out, the historicity of human beings does not make truth impossible; on the contrary, it is the very condition that makes truth attainable. For human beings can understand only from within a particular horizon; there is no consciousness without a horizon. Truth here is not the complete possession of an object, but the degree to which Being discloses itself to human beings.
Human beings do not construct truth; they can only participate in it to the extent that truth itself allows. For truth is not an invention of the human mind but an order of Being that transcends humanity. Yet human beings can never penetrate this order with divine absoluteness. They cannot exhaust truth; they can only approach it. Human beings are in need of truth and long for it, yet they are condemned—and obliged—to interpretation.
The task of hermeneutics is not to abolish truth, but to multiply the possibilities of approaching it. Interpretation is necessary, but the necessity of interpretation does not imply the absence of truth. For interpretation can be possible only if there is something that is interpreted. In other words, narratives do not replace truth; they constitute the human ways of approaching it.
At this point, the question of history emerges once again. Can history truly be separated from gossip, or is it merely a more disciplined form of gossip? At first glance, this question may appear provocative, yet it is important because it reveals the ontological and epistemological limits of historiography. Both gossip and history are narratives that circulate about the past. Both select, emphasize, omit, and interpret. An event enters collective memory not as it happened, but as it is narrated.
The fundamental difference between history and gossip, however, lies in method. Gossip relies on circulation itself, whereas history must be a narration grounded in investigation. The historian subjects accounts to criticism, compares sources, examines contexts, and seeks to discipline the narrative. Yet despite all these methods, history can never become the past itself. For the past no longer exists; the historian works only with traces and signs.
In the Heideggerian sense, history is not “that which happened,” but the manner in which what has happened comes into disclosure in the present. History is not the past itself, but the hermeneutic relationship established with the past. It is impossible for history ever to free itself entirely from its narrative dimension.
As Jacques Rancière explains in The Names of History: An Essay in the Poetics of Knowledge, although the English words “story” and “history” share an etymological affinity, the English nevertheless distinguish between them. (p. 29) Yet despite this distinction, history is, ultimately, still a form of narrative. What historians do is select particular events from the infinite number of events that have taken place in the past, place them within a specific web of causality, and present them as a meaningful whole. For this reason, there will always remain a structural kinship between history and story.
As the outcome of everything discussed thus far, I hope it has become clear, at least to some extent, that the essential issue is not to draw absolute boundaries among history, story, and gossip, but rather to reveal the narrative character of the relationship human beings establish with the world, with time, with memory, and with truth. For before being beings who merely live within events, human beings are beings who seek to make sense of them.
Thus, history, story, and gossip all appear before us as different manifestations of the need to transform fragmented experience into a meaningful whole: human beings are not only beings who live, but beings who interpret what they live; not only beings who see, but beings who give meaning to what they see; not only beings who remember, but beings who reconstruct what they remember. Therefore, neither the kinship between history and story nor the closeness between gossip and memory is accidental. Each of them is an attempt by human beings to produce meaning in the face of time.
However, the fact that all these forms of narrative meet on a common ground does not mean that they can be reduced to one another. What distinguishes history from gossip is not that history has attained truth, but rather the discipline of method, investigation, and criticism that it has developed in order to approach truth. History is not about certainty; it is about responsibility.
The historian cannot reproduce the past. Yet by reading attentively the traces left behind, by striving to hear silenced voices, and by confronting the blind spots of his or her own age, the historian can make an effort to approach truth. Therefore, history is not the past itself, but the name of an honest and disciplined hermeneutic relationship established with the past.
Amid the noise of the digital age, this truth becomes even more evident. Today, humanity produces, shares, and consumes more narratives than at any other time in history. Yet the multiplication of narratives does not automatically mean the multiplication of meaning. On the contrary, an abundance of narratives may sometimes create a new layer of fog that obscures truth.
For this reason, the fundamental problem of our age is not a lack of information, but a lack of meaning; not an insufficiency of data, but an insufficiency of wisdom. Human beings know more things than ever before, yet understand fewer.
Ultimately, the destiny of human beings is to walk that delicate line between being in need of truth and being condemned to interpretation. We can neither escape narratives altogether nor claim the right to reduce truth merely to narratives. Truth is too vast to be fully encompassed by any narrative, and human beings are too limited ever to exhaust truth completely.
Therefore, to reflect on history, story, and gossip is, in reality, to reflect upon human existence itself. For human beings live among narratives, yet they exist with a longing for a truth that transcends them. The ultimate meaning of all hermeneutic effort, all historiography, and all human reflection lies precisely here.
What falls to the lot of human beings is not to possess truth, but to cultivate humility before it; not to consume it, but to journey toward it. For the greatness of human beings lies not in ruling over truth, but in being humble and aware enough to hear truth’s call.
Thus, history, story, memory, and even gossip are, at the deepest level, nothing other than humanity’s attempt to understand itself and its place in the world. Human beings speak, narrate, remember, and interpret because, beyond all these, they are trying to hear the echo of truth within the infinite silence of Being.
Then what remains for us, other than to bring this essay to a close with the prayer of Özkan Gözel (Who Has Ever Found Their Place?, p. 123)?
“May I arrive at such a crossroads in my life that all my past, which once appeared to me as a meaningless heap of deeds and actions, may suddenly reveal its meaning.
May a halo of meaning spread from that point of intersection across my entire past.
May I come to understand that
nothing I have lived through was meaningless,
that everything was in its proper place, exactly as it ought to have been.
May I come to understand that
water indeed finds its own course.
And may I come to understand that
I, too, had a destiny all along,
And all along, through what I have written,
I had already become part of it….”
