From Public to Private Life and vice versa
From Public to Private Life and vice versa

Social Comments (Gossip) as a Dynamic Expression of Positive and Negative Emotions

Summary/Abstract: This article investigates how the issue of both public and private life, and how public events (even on the micro-level of the neighbourhood or the macro-level of the city or the country where we live) pass to the private area through social comments, i.e., daily gossip. However, apart from the dissemination of information, the article focuses on the dynamic presence of the emotions that accompany social comments. The judgments and comments of people are accompanied by emotions, either positive towards some people, which in essence promote persons or situations in a positive way, or expressing negative emotions, which accompany negative judgments and, in essence, judge and control the behaviours of people. The article investigates both the expression and the dynamic presence and the role of these emotions in combination with the speech of the narrators. The article is fully based on ethnographic fieldwork research (in the period of 2016–2017) as a part of a wider research project. It is based on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, individual, as well as group, interviews with the informants.

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