IN the small towns located throughout the Ozarks, people want to say that everyone knows everyone's business – and if they do not, they feel free to offer an educated guess.
One of the places established here today to trade gossip Dee's Place, a restaurant in the country where a dozen people gather every morning around a long covered with a member-only permanent sign "Old Farts Club", which they call themselves, to talk about the weather, politics and, of course, their neighbors.
But too late, more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 has shifted from sharing the latest news and rumors in the eggs and coffee for the Mountain Grove Forum on social media site called Topix, where they wrote and read a surprisingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity , about each other.
And in Place Dee, people are not happy. Phoebe waiter Best said the site has caused fights and divorce caused. Restaurant owner, Jim Deverell, Topix call "waste of character assassination". And hear the conversation, Shane James, cooking, walking out of the kitchen with anger tense.
His wife, Jennifer, have been targeted in a post titled "weird", he said, who described the mother of two as, inter alia, "a methed-out, doped-out prostitute with AIDS". Not a word was true, the couple said, but the consequences are quite real.