Understanding Godsib

This paper examines the study of gossip (godsib being the classical term) in human communities. In particular, we compare and contrast the study of gossip in the humanities and compare it with the development of gossip techniques as communication primitives in computer science. Distributed computer systems designers have developed various gossip based techniques for efficient communication and state maintainence in large unstructured networks. On the other hand, academics in the humanities have examined how gossip occurs naturally in various human communities, its spread, and effects. Our goal in this paper is to survey the literature in the two broad fields and compare them to see if academics on either side can learn from the other.