ABSTRACT
The study of rumors has been ruled by a negative conception: rumors have been taken to be necessarily false, fanciful, or irrational. For a long time it was thought that rumors were substitutes: lacking reliable, controlled media, a substitute or second-best media had to be found. The negative conception that associates rumors with falsehood is technological in nature: the only good communication should be controlled communication. Rumors demonstrate once again, as if it were necessary to do so, that all certainty is social: what the group to which we belong considers to be true is true. Like rumors, religion consists in contagious faith: one expects the faithful to take someone at his word, and to abide by the revealed truth. Rumors constitute an alternative source of information, that is, a source that is perforce uncontrolled.
