The phrase “that’s so high school” is often used to dismiss petty, inane gossip. You may hear such gossip in the halls of any high school in America, but the high school drama that the students are talking about doesn’t make headlines. What does make headlines, are similarly petty stories about celebrities. Do students think these headlines are “so high school,” or are they a deeper issue?

The idea of celebrity gossip or “trashy” tabloids has been around for decades, but it’s heightened thanks to social media and the internet. Because of this, celebrity gossip is highly open to the public. Comment sections are free for anyone to share opinions, or further the story at hand.

While plenty of high school students can imagine or have experienced what it feels like to be talked about in a negative way, can any of them really speak to how those words  feel coming from millions of strangers? Senior Theo Buchwald shares, “It feels like an invasion of privacy. No one would like that, whether you’re rich and famous, or just a regular person.”

There’s a much larger threat that celebrity gossip poses to society, aside from simply hurting those who make headlines, which is the habitual, careless way in which we talk about people. It shouldn’t be normalized to pit people against each other, or to say mean things behind a screen, even if it’s about a famous person. Social media damaging young minds is often talked about with respect to high school students– while they can refrain from gossiping, they can’t stop news outlets and the general public from normalizing this type of behavior.

Senior Anna Jardin protests this gossip altogether, “I try to just live under a rock when it comes to celebrity gossip.” She continued to explain that it doesn’t add anything to her life, and that the best thing to do is to not engage in that culture, “I just let it go in one ear and out the other!”

It seems that the students of high school try not to contribute to gossip like this, because it impacts more than just our school community. We can all afford to gossip less, even if it’s about people who will never know.