A central concept was the Latin term fama, which encompassed rumour, reputation, gossip and news: Fama herself was often imagined as a winged goddess, with ears and eyes covered and tongues extending from her palms. These images were a visual representation of what it was like to live under constant surveillance by one’s neighbours as well as the authorities.

Some have described rumoring as a task of collective problem solving (Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Shibutani,1966) withreasonably well defined start and end points. A process helping individuals make sense of their environments and cope withuncertainty, rumoring tends to dissipate once cognitive unclarity has been eliminated (Caplow, 1947).

Informal communication in this context falls under formal definitions ofrumoring: informal,person-to-person communication pertaining to current, newsworthy topics of interest among a population (Allport andPostman, 1947; Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Caplow, 1947; Rosnow and Kimmel, 2000; Shibutani, 1966). A key componentof this definition of rumor is that such statements are not confirmed by official sources. Although rumoring has historicallybeen a notoriously difficult phenomenon to measure, thefield has a developed basic understanding of the general principlesof rumoring behaviors in disaster contexts. These common behavioral patterns allow us to refine our approach for measuringsignal of disaster-related rumoring activity.

Straightway Rumor flies through Libya’s great cities, 220Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world. She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride, slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds. She is the last, they say, our Mother Earth produced. Bursting in rage against the gods, she bore a sister for Coeus and Enceladus: Rumor, quicksilver afoot and swift on the wing, a monster, horrific, huge and under every feather on her body—what a marvel— an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes 230and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news. By night she flies aloft, between the earth and sky, whirring across the dark, never closing her lids in soothing sleep. By day she keeps her watch, crouched on a peaked roof or palace turret, terrorizing the great cities, clinging as fast to her twisted lies as she clings to words of truth. Now Rumor is in her glory, filling Africa’s ears with tale on tale of intrigue, bruiting her song of facts and falsehoods mingled . . . 240“Here this Aeneas, born of Trojan blood, has arrived in Carthage, and lovely Dido deigns to join the man in wedlock. Even now they warm the winter, long as it lasts, with obscene desire, oblivious to their kingdoms, abject thralls of lust.”