The Peep Diaries

Interview in Globe and and Live Chat on Globe site Tomorrow

2011-02-15T15:02:17+00:00

Here’s an interview with me in the Globe and Mail, mostly talking about the making of the documentary “Peep Culture”. I talk Peep, family, the future…anyway, check it out. Also tomorrow (Wed Feb 16 at 11am) I’ll be doing a live chat with Globe and Mail tv critic Andrew Ryan if anybody wants to drop by and ask questions. The live chat will be happening here.

First Screening of Peep Culture: The Documentary

2011-01-14T16:59:40+00:00

Peep Culture: The Documentary is done! It will have its Canadian premiere across the land on CBC News Network 10pm (est) February 16th as part of the CBC’s Passionate Eye documentary series. Check out the official trailer on the main page!

Full Body Scanners and Confessional Culture

2010-12-23T15:37:40+00:00

Really interesting piece in the Washington Post about Full Body Scanners, confessional culture, privacy and the decisions we make. I’m quoted as well, in the course of connecting our decision to go through a full body scanner or not to the rise of Peep Culture. From the article: More broadly, we have made peace with our confessional culture. If we are outwardly ambivalent that moments of deep personal anguish and light mundanity are processed into entertainment without much distinction on reality TV and YouTube, we nevertheless eagerly consume it all. We vote with links clicked and cookies accepted. Even surveillance itself becomes titillation. As Hal Niedzviecki, a cultural commentator in Toronto and author of “The Peep Diaries,” points out, the evening news features surveillance camera footage of bungled convenience store robberies. Dash-cam arrest videos show up online. Niedzviecki calls the current state of things “peep culture.” “Peep culture conditions us to want to use our privacy to achieve things,” says Niedzviecki, who suggests this breeds a kind of passivity, a failure to ask questions. “It’s not, ‘Oh, no, no, you can’t ask me to give this up.’ It’s, ‘Sure, you can have it, but what am I getting back?’” In other words, we often feel we’re exercising control over what we give up. And we tend to focus on what we think we’re getting: security, social mobility, convenience, the validation of fellow Twitterati. So, yes, the vast majority of us will continue to go through the full-body scanners. We will do it most of all because we hope the new technology makes us safer, but also because we’re in a rush, because we don’t want to make a fuss, because we don’t want to find out just how “enhanced” a pat-down can be, because we don’t even know what a full-body scanner is. We will do it because we’ve been inured to giving up things when we go to the airport, and it stinks, sure, but this is the price of flying in a scary age. We will do it because thinkingly or unthinkingly we have concluded this is a good bargain.

Peep Talk in Windsor, Ontario

2010-11-04T20:48:02+00:00

Come on out if you are in the area! Free event! Tuesday, November 9 8:00pm - 9:30pm Location: Green Bean Cafe2320 Wyandotte St W.Windsor, ON Facebook event link here. Hal Niedzviecki brings the Peep to Windsor in a public presentation based on his critically acclaimed book The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors (City Lights Books).About the Talk: Join Hal as he chronicles the shift from Pop Culture to Peep Culture. In this lively presentation, Hal will explore everything from streets lined with surveillance cameras and daycares equipped with webcams to citizens eager to track themselves. Behind all those cameras, cell phones and profiles are real people. Hal will introduce you to, among others, the digicam vigilante behind John.tv, the masterminds of Twitter, a Star Wars obsessed sex slave housewife blogger, and so much more!

Facebook, Catfish and Peep

2010-10-10T12:24:02+00:00

Some interesting thoughts in this piece with the main theme: “in the world of social media, nothing is real”. Very refreshing to read something thoughtful that connects the various silo-ed categories media usually puts this stuff in. Which is to say that the writer, Denise Ryan, looks at a the doc-moc trend, and explores the way ‘networking’ is changing in the era of social media, and takes a snapshot of the big picture of Peep Culture. All that plus commentary from yours truly and a shout out to my upcoming talk at Canzine West!

Peep is Coming to Vancouver

2010-09-30T16:33:02+00:00

Hey everyone, I’ll be doing a Peep talk in Vancouver as part of Canzine West: festival of zines and underground culture. I’ll be talking about the rise of Peep Culture and exploring Peep phenomenon specifically as they pertain to independent culture creators, namely: is Peep the triumph of indie, or its destruction? So, if you are in the Vancouver area, please drop by. And there’s tons more stuff going on at Canzine West! Canzine West runs from 1–7pm and the Peep Talk happens from 2–3pm. Details: Saturday, October 16, 2010 at Canzine West W2 Storyeum Vancouver—151 West Cordova Street $5 admission comes with a free copy of the Fall issue of Broken Pencil Magazine – issue 49 “Last Puppet Standing” http://www.brokenpencil.com/canzine/

Why Peep Trumps Privacy

2010-08-19T11:51:02+00:00

Hey everyone, here’s a short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why, despite all the warnings about privacy online, we just can’t bring ourselves to care nearly as much as we should. A taste: “Oh but haven’t recent polls demonstrated that we are more concerned than ever about our privacy online? Sure they have. But they have also shown that our concern doesn’t actually translate into action. We may tell pollsters we are concerned about our privacy, but we don’t actually do much about it. Surprisingly few of us can actually be bothered to adjust the privacy settings available to us. (A Pew Research Study put the number of us who change Facebook privacy settings in the 25 percent to 44 percent range, which is to say that not even half of us are motivated to protect our most intimate details by taking five minutes to click a few buttons.)” Read in full:

Death on Facebook

2010-07-21T14:20:02+00:00

Here’s an article in the New York Times about how Facebook is struggling to deal with the pages of deceased. They used to delete them. Now family or friends can request to have the page turned into a memorial, frozen in time save for the comments that those who have already been accepted as ‘friends’ can continue to post. The assumption from Facebook (not questioned by the Times) is that this problem can be solved through technology – we just need better algorithms more capable of determining when someone has died so that their page can be then locked down with all necessary sensitivity. But our widespread embrace of Peep Culture suggests that we might want something else: new ways to continue living on through social media after our deaths. Why should the dead not be allowed to have any new ‘friends’ (when, after all, those friends are entirely virtual and illusory anyway?). Why can’t the dead decline to attend events, leave comments on other people’s pages, etc. etc. Why shouldn’t the dead continue to discuss their own wants and needs? Perhaps in the future we will pay people to continue to maintain our various profiles and blogs after we are gone? (In the Jewish tradition, it is not uncommon to hire a Yeshiva student to say the required daily prayers Jewish law requires be said for the dead.) I know, I know, this is getting pretty weird. Nonetheless, the dead have more in common than the living when it comes to their online presence. The dead are disembodied, the dead are virtual, the dead exist only in the bits and bytes of our imaginations. And the dead, like our Facebook profiles, live on forever, long after we are gone.

Peep Diaries in the London Review of Books

2010-06-20T00:32:33+00:00

The Peep Diaries is described as a “bracingly informal book” in a 5 book essay/review that appeared in the recent issue of the London Review of Books. Check out the whole piece here. The other books discussed are The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook by Ben MezrichThe Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future by Craig WatkinsStealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia AngwinThe Tyranny of Email: The Four Thousand Year Journey to your Inbox by John Freeman

Debating Reality TV on TV Ontario

2010-06-18T20:48:33+00:00

Last week I was on a long panel discussion about the impact of Reality TV on culture and society. A lot of interesting points were made. You can watch the whole thing here.