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Assistant Professor Eric Gilbert of the School of InteractiveComputing examined hundreds of thousands of emails from the formerEnron corporation and found that -- by the definition of"gossip" as messages that contain information about aperson or persons not among the recipients -- 14.7 percent of theemails qualify as office scuttlebutt. What's more, Gilbert foundthat gossip is prevalent at all levels of the corporate hierarchy,though lower levels gossip the most. "Gossip gets a bad rap," said Gilbert, an expert insocial computing who runs the Comp.Social Lab at Georgia Tech."When you say 'gossip,' most people immediately have anegative interpretation, but it's actually a very important form ofcommunication. Even tiny bits of information, like 'Eric said he'dbe late for this meeting,' add up; after just a few of thosemessages, you start to get an impression that Eric is a lateperson. Gossip is generally how we know what we know about eachother, and for this study we viewed it simply as a means to sharesocial information." Still, another finding was that "negative" gossip,characterized through a Natural Language Text Processing analysis,was in fact 2.7 times more prevalent than positive gossip, though asignificant portion of the messages were sentiment-neutral. Thefindings, according to Gilbert and Ph.D. student Tanushree Mitra,represent an important test of anthropological theories aboutgossip in what can reasonably be called the world's most popularelectronic social medium: email. "There is a rich literature in anthropology and sociology onthe universality and utility of gossip among human socialgroups," Mitra said. "A recent survey of that literaturesummarized gossip as having four main purposes: information,entertainment, intimacy and influence. We found evidence of allthose categories in the Enron emails, relating to both business andpersonal relationships." The researchers divided the emails among seven layers of Enronhierarchy, from rank-and-file office employees all the way up topresidents and CEOs, and found gossip emails flowing within andamong nearly every level, with the heaviest flow among therank-and-file. However, the second heaviest flow within a singlelevel occurred among Enron vice presidents and directors, and by awide margin the strongest upward flow of gossip was from the vicepresidents and directors up one level to presidents and CEOs. Vicepresidents and directors also gossiped the most down the chain,with the heaviest downward flow originating from their level andending up at the lowest, rank-and-file level. Might these findings be unique to Enron? After all, actions leadingto the energy-trading company's 2001 bankruptcy have earned it anotorious place in U.S. corporate history. Could such anenvironment lead to social behavior that is outside the norm? "Enron certainly had what could be called a 'cowboy culture,'but I suspect the way they behaved internally to each other did notdiffer significantly from most other U.S. corporations,"Gilbert said. "A lot of the emails we're looking at were fromthe rank-and-file, and it was the Enron CEOs -- a tiny fraction ofits employee population -- who initiated and directed the actionsthat brought the company down. The average employee had no ideawhat was going on." Indeed, the Enron corpus -- some 600,000 messages purchasedfollowing the company's bankruptcy and now made freely availablefor study -- represents the world's largest publicly accessiblebody of naturally occurring emails, and it has provided grist fornumerous scientific and technical advances. For example, Gilbertsaid, email spam filters took a huge leap forward in efficiency in2005 due largely to advancements made from analyzing the Enroncorpus. And recently, Gilbert himself used Enron emails to discoverthat certain words and phrases in email strongly predict whetherthose messages are delivered up or down the corporate hierarchy.Still, he admitted to finding a slightly higher level of workplacegossip flowing around via email than he expected. "I was a little surprised that it turned out to be almost 15percent," Gilbert said. "But then again, gossip issomething we all do in every aspect of our lives. I imaginecorporate executives will probably take note of this -- and thensend an email to Jennifer down the hall saying that Bob inpurchasing gossips all the time." Gilbert's and Mitra's findings are summarized in the paper"Have You Heard? How Gossip Flows Through WorkplaceEmail," which Mitra is presenting June 6 at the 6thInternational AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'12), being held at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. I am an expert from led-spotlightbulbs.com, while we provides the quality product, such as China LED Track Lighting , China Led Desk Lamp Clamp, E27 Led Bulb,and more.
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