People just can’t keep their mouths shut: reasoning for motivation to share information

Just about everyone has wondered why people just can’t keep a secret at one point or another.  What exactly motivates people to share information they know that about other people?  Sharing a secret is certainly a perfect way to keep a conversation going if your guest is becoming bored with your small talk about the weather, television shows, and sports. I feel we are all guilty of doing this even though our intentions are good; we are not really focused on who’s secrets we are revealing as much as we are in just wrapping our minds around a conversation topic.  However there are people who have an agenda behind telling secrets.  Certain people are looking for a designated response or opinion on the told secrets.  Wikileaks editor and spokesman Julian Assange is clearly a man looking to either startle or enlighten an audience by sharing secret documents to the world on the activity of governments.  The information that Assange has exposed is not just your usual dinner conversation topic like talking about what you heard through the grapevine that your friends did the other night.

Would it be fair to say that Assange is gossiping at an international level?  Is not gossiping the actual verb for spreading negative facts about people to others?  Say we consider Assange to be a gossiper for sake of argument.  This leads us to a possible motivation for the Wikileaks release of documents.  According to psychological studies, the end result of gossip “is the feeling of superiority that results from such vicious spreading of information” (http://factoidz.com/what-motivates-people-to-gossip/).  From here we can speculate that Assange is releasing documents to raise his ego.  In other words, he wants to be the attention of the public as well as being remembered as the martyr who was brave enough to be an international gossiper.

Also take into consideration that technology does in fact make it easier to spread information and say things you wouldn’t normally say in person.  These would include-people who post personal facebook statuses either telling about themselves or attacking other people they wouldn’t have the nerve to say face to face and kids trolling the Internet; they probably wouldn’t say the hateful slang they spew over the Internet in front of the people they attack, if they did they’re parents would ground them.  The Internet can indeed make people more mischievous for there are no direct consequences to provoking others while online like a confrontational fist fight in response to bullying and harassing.  Could you imagine Julian Assange running down the street with paper documents in his hands yelling out to get peoples’ attention or even confronting politicians face to face about the information he obtained?

Now we must speculate whether or not Assange would have had the guts to post millions of documents containing secret information without the aid of a website (wikileaks website).  It is true that his name is out in the open, and as opposed to internet trollers he is not annonymous but I feel that the act of just sharing info on the internet is much more of a comfortable environment to do so in.