In his time at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau periodically returned to Concord, MA, and when he did, the village seemed to him like a “great news room.” After days alone, he found himself surrounded by gossip on all sides, from the idle talk of his neighbors to the frivolous reports in the newspapers. Thoreau was not immune to the appeal of gossip, which he saw as “really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.” But he worried that society was being dulled by its fascination with trivial events. “Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner,” Thoreau lamented, “but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?'”
Thoreau would be disturbed by today’s endless flood of celebrity bulletins and made-for-cable-TV courtroom face-offs not because he thought gossip was inherently wrong, but because of what it was distracting America from. He missed the opportunity to deplore the fact that people who can rattle off the details of the voting in “American Idol” know little about the presidential campaign, and that the Laci Peterson killing gets more attention than North Korea’s nuclear program. But he anticipated, long before the 24-hour news cycle and cellphones, that in modern America the problem might well be not too little access to information, but too much. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he writes in “Walden,” “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Read it.
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