Hal Niedzviecki
The Peep Diaries:
How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors
City Lights Publishers
$18.95
When Toronto social critic Hal Niedzviecki tracked his wife with a GPS device, he found the experience addictive. But not in a good way; it made him nervous and paranoid.
When, on her cycle to work, the Google Maps dot representing his wife stopped for five minutes, he feared the worst. She'd had an accident! She'd been hit by a truck!! Turned out she'd stopped to pick up a tuna sandwich at a bakery. But Niedzviecki didn't know that. And it made him crazy.
"I'm not feeling happier, and I'm not feeling safer," he writes in his unnerving new book, The Peep Diaries. "I'm feeling like the distance between what I know and don't know is greater than ever. I want video. I want to know exactly what she's doing when she's doing it."
If Niedzviecki is right -- and he presents a disturbingly compelling case -- more and more of us share the feeling. We want to know everything we can about everyone else, and we want everyone else to know almost everything about us.
Niedzviecki calls it Peep culture, and declares that it represents the most fundamental transformation of western society since the Industrial Revolution. Even allowing for authorial overstatement, it's clear that something consequential is happening here.
Peep was born of our fascination for celebrity, nourished by Hollywood, television and the whole apparatus of pop culture. It drew critical sustenance from reality TV, the best-established and arguably the only profitable Peep industry, which implanted the notion that even nobodies, at least briefly, can be celebrities. But it is our embrace of social networks and other Internet sharing sites that is turning Peep into an unstoppable force with potentially profound consequences.
Using FaceBook, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, chat rooms and blogs, we are indiscriminately sharing -- and too often "oversharing" -- thoughts and fears, triumphs and bad behaviour.
"We are creating public archives of the events of our lives like never before," Niedzviecki observes. "And what we innocently give away to the entire world has a hidden, potential value that most of us can't even imagine."
Corporations and institutions are using our willingness to share to turn our private information into what Niedzvieki calls "the final frontier of capitalism."All our opinions on a product, family snapshots and address changes are banked and assigned value, he argues. The information can determine such things as whether or not we get a job, a mortgage or a decent price on car insurance.
Peep culture, Niedzviecki argues, is our "twisted answer" to the need to proclaim our own existence in an era in which old links to family and community have largely collapsed. We are willing to reveal ourselves, even against our best interests, in the hope that we might, however briefly, alleviate the loneliness we feel.
Hardwired for social contact, we long, he says, for something we have lost: "Essential recognition of our humanness, intrinsic acknowledgement that we exist."
Surveillance, Niedzviecki argues, is conjoined with Peep culture. Both "share the idea that seeing all, knowing all, divulging all, is a good thing." And while the growth of surveillance worries a minority of the population, most of us are comfortable with it, the author says.
In part, that's because we've been conditioned by television, where surveillance is presented as an essential tool for catching bad guys, while keeping us thoroughly entertained.
"In the age of Peep," writes Niedzviecki, "we don't fear Big Brother, we clamour to be subjected to Big Brother. In fact, we want to be Big Brother."
Last year, 43 million people around the world -- triple the number in 2007 -- had location-based services on their cellphones. This year, Google launched Latitude, which shows users' locations on Google Maps to anyone they've invited to track them. Daycare surveillance is already widespread and may become de rigueur for parents.
In the near future, Niedzviecki predicts, millions more will start reflexively monitoring themselves, their loved ones, even their pets. What it amounts to, he says, is a North American civilization "in the full sway of a domestic surveillance renaissance."
We're not afraid of the surveillance state, he asserts. Rather, we fear its gaps.
"We fear the moments when, unobserved, unrecorded and unexhibited, we virtually disappear. We embrace surveillance because we're terrified of disappearing without a trace."
The statement is typical of Niedzviecki's penchant for making sweeping assertions without much empirical support. Still, his explanations for Peep's subliminal appeal make intuitive sense.
As with any social movement, Peep has been embraced by some who take the idea to its logical extreme. One such person is Padme, a B.C. woman whose Journey to the Darkside blog attracts upwards of 4,000 visits a day.
Padme, a stay-at-home mother, writes about her health and family life. But she also writes about her secret life, about her need to be dominated by her husband, whom she calls Master Anakin. Anakin's domination includes vermilion spankings and other masochistic sexual behaviour, all lovingly documented in videos, pictures and words on her blog.
Padme's hardly alone. Niedzviecki talks to "Beauty," a petite middle-aged mother who posts nude pictures of herself on a site called Voyeurweb, and later shares drinks with a band of seemingly ordinary empty-nesters who similarly expose their bodies and carnal couplings.
A site run by Maryland artist Frank Warren called PostSecret, which has collected and displayed 100,000 confessions anonymously sent in on postcards, is on the front lines of Peep, Niedzviecki writes. PostSecret has attracted more than 240 million visits to date.
According to Niedzviecki, Twitter represents the next stage in Peep's evolution. Twitter is all about revealing tiny secrets you'd otherwise keep from those who know you best. It feels, the author writes, as if you're talking to yourself. "It's a purer, more instantaneous form of Peep."
To understand Peep better, Niedzviecki embraced some of its methods. As well as tracking his wife, he tried out for a reality TV show, gathered information about his father from private detective websites and installed a surveillance camera overlooking the alley behind his house. (Nothing ever happened, but he found himself watching compulsively anyway.)
He also started a blog. Niedzviecki's blog posts about Peep Culture drew little interest. But relatively pedestrian material about raising his child or squabbling with his brother attracted a much greater response. His conclusion: "They wanted to read Hal on Hal."
As well, Niedzviecki joined Facebook, which, with more than 10 million members in Canada, is one of the great purveyors of Peep. After accumulating more than 700 "friends," he invited them to join him at a neighbourhood bar for conversations and drinks. Only one showed up.
People, Niedzviecki surmises, don't want to make the leap from virtual to real relationships. "We'd rather be at home peering at each other online than putting ourselves out there for friendship, messy emotional connection and all the responsibilities and frustrations that come with forming attachments to others."
By the book's end, Niedzviecki admits he still can't decide whether Peep's potential benefits outweigh its obvious vices.
In theory, Peep offers a culture of widespread democracy and equality. Peep isn't about how we're all turning into voyeurs, he insists. In fact, it's "a bold attempt to decentralize power, a grassroots campaign to return to individuals the capacity to tell their own stories about who they are and how they live."
But nor is Peep "some benevolent shtetl of like-minded, kindly villagers always willing to bend an ear, offer advice and pitch in," Niedzviecki cautions. Rather, he says, it is inextricably linked to forces of bureaucracy, capitalism and law and order, forces that keep our society focused on the production and consumption of wealth. "Peep offers only the illusion of the village, only a facsimile of community."
Peep, which can instantly evoke images of transparency, transgression and totalitarianism, is all about contradictions, he concludes.
For good or ill, it's almost certainly unavoidable. "In the future," Niedzviecki writes, "not partaking in Peep culture may mean your disappearance. You'll be a living ghost; you'll move amongst the rest of us, but if we can't access your profile, we won't notice or care about you."
In The Peep Diaries, Hal Niedzviecki illuminates the landscape of Peep with acuity and clear-headed prose. An important topic. An important book.
[rc]
Don Butler is a senior writer at the Citizen.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
August 2, 2009
CANADA: Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours
.
OTTAWA, Ontario / The Ottawa Citizen / Entertainment / August 2, 2009
THE AGE OF PEEP
We want to know all about everyone else -- and we want everyone else to know about us
By Don Butler, The Ottawa Citizen
Hal Niedzviecki
The Peep Diaries:
How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors
City Lights Publishers
$18.95
When Toronto social critic Hal Niedzviecki tracked his wife with a GPS device, he found the experience addictive. But not in a good way; it made him nervous and paranoid.
When, on her cycle to work, the Google Maps dot representing his wife stopped for five minutes, he feared the worst. She'd had an accident! She'd been hit by a truck!! Turned out she'd stopped to pick up a tuna sandwich at a bakery. But Niedzviecki didn't know that. And it made him crazy.
"I'm not feeling happier, and I'm not feeling safer," he writes in his unnerving new book, The Peep Diaries. "I'm feeling like the distance between what I know and don't know is greater than ever. I want video. I want to know exactly what she's doing when she's doing it."
If Niedzviecki is right -- and he presents a disturbingly compelling case -- more and more of us share the feeling. We want to know everything we can about everyone else, and we want everyone else to know almost everything about us.
Niedzviecki calls it Peep culture, and declares that it represents the most fundamental transformation of western society since the Industrial Revolution. Even allowing for authorial overstatement, it's clear that something consequential is happening here.
Peep was born of our fascination for celebrity, nourished by Hollywood, television and the whole apparatus of pop culture. It drew critical sustenance from reality TV, the best-established and arguably the only profitable Peep industry, which implanted the notion that even nobodies, at least briefly, can be celebrities. But it is our embrace of social networks and other Internet sharing sites that is turning Peep into an unstoppable force with potentially profound consequences.
Using FaceBook, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, chat rooms and blogs, we are indiscriminately sharing -- and too often "oversharing" -- thoughts and fears, triumphs and bad behaviour.
"We are creating public archives of the events of our lives like never before," Niedzviecki observes. "And what we innocently give away to the entire world has a hidden, potential value that most of us can't even imagine."
Corporations and institutions are using our willingness to share to turn our private information into what Niedzvieki calls "the final frontier of capitalism."All our opinions on a product, family snapshots and address changes are banked and assigned value, he argues. The information can determine such things as whether or not we get a job, a mortgage or a decent price on car insurance.
Peep culture, Niedzviecki argues, is our "twisted answer" to the need to proclaim our own existence in an era in which old links to family and community have largely collapsed. We are willing to reveal ourselves, even against our best interests, in the hope that we might, however briefly, alleviate the loneliness we feel.
Hardwired for social contact, we long, he says, for something we have lost: "Essential recognition of our humanness, intrinsic acknowledgement that we exist."
Surveillance, Niedzviecki argues, is conjoined with Peep culture. Both "share the idea that seeing all, knowing all, divulging all, is a good thing." And while the growth of surveillance worries a minority of the population, most of us are comfortable with it, the author says.
In part, that's because we've been conditioned by television, where surveillance is presented as an essential tool for catching bad guys, while keeping us thoroughly entertained.
"In the age of Peep," writes Niedzviecki, "we don't fear Big Brother, we clamour to be subjected to Big Brother. In fact, we want to be Big Brother."
Last year, 43 million people around the world -- triple the number in 2007 -- had location-based services on their cellphones. This year, Google launched Latitude, which shows users' locations on Google Maps to anyone they've invited to track them. Daycare surveillance is already widespread and may become de rigueur for parents.
In the near future, Niedzviecki predicts, millions more will start reflexively monitoring themselves, their loved ones, even their pets. What it amounts to, he says, is a North American civilization "in the full sway of a domestic surveillance renaissance."
We're not afraid of the surveillance state, he asserts. Rather, we fear its gaps.
"We fear the moments when, unobserved, unrecorded and unexhibited, we virtually disappear. We embrace surveillance because we're terrified of disappearing without a trace."
The statement is typical of Niedzviecki's penchant for making sweeping assertions without much empirical support. Still, his explanations for Peep's subliminal appeal make intuitive sense.
As with any social movement, Peep has been embraced by some who take the idea to its logical extreme. One such person is Padme, a B.C. woman whose Journey to the Darkside blog attracts upwards of 4,000 visits a day.
Padme, a stay-at-home mother, writes about her health and family life. But she also writes about her secret life, about her need to be dominated by her husband, whom she calls Master Anakin. Anakin's domination includes vermilion spankings and other masochistic sexual behaviour, all lovingly documented in videos, pictures and words on her blog.
Padme's hardly alone. Niedzviecki talks to "Beauty," a petite middle-aged mother who posts nude pictures of herself on a site called Voyeurweb, and later shares drinks with a band of seemingly ordinary empty-nesters who similarly expose their bodies and carnal couplings.
A site run by Maryland artist Frank Warren called PostSecret, which has collected and displayed 100,000 confessions anonymously sent in on postcards, is on the front lines of Peep, Niedzviecki writes. PostSecret has attracted more than 240 million visits to date.
According to Niedzviecki, Twitter represents the next stage in Peep's evolution. Twitter is all about revealing tiny secrets you'd otherwise keep from those who know you best. It feels, the author writes, as if you're talking to yourself. "It's a purer, more instantaneous form of Peep."
To understand Peep better, Niedzviecki embraced some of its methods. As well as tracking his wife, he tried out for a reality TV show, gathered information about his father from private detective websites and installed a surveillance camera overlooking the alley behind his house. (Nothing ever happened, but he found himself watching compulsively anyway.)
He also started a blog. Niedzviecki's blog posts about Peep Culture drew little interest. But relatively pedestrian material about raising his child or squabbling with his brother attracted a much greater response. His conclusion: "They wanted to read Hal on Hal."
As well, Niedzviecki joined Facebook, which, with more than 10 million members in Canada, is one of the great purveyors of Peep. After accumulating more than 700 "friends," he invited them to join him at a neighbourhood bar for conversations and drinks. Only one showed up.
People, Niedzviecki surmises, don't want to make the leap from virtual to real relationships. "We'd rather be at home peering at each other online than putting ourselves out there for friendship, messy emotional connection and all the responsibilities and frustrations that come with forming attachments to others."
By the book's end, Niedzviecki admits he still can't decide whether Peep's potential benefits outweigh its obvious vices.
In theory, Peep offers a culture of widespread democracy and equality. Peep isn't about how we're all turning into voyeurs, he insists. In fact, it's "a bold attempt to decentralize power, a grassroots campaign to return to individuals the capacity to tell their own stories about who they are and how they live."
But nor is Peep "some benevolent shtetl of like-minded, kindly villagers always willing to bend an ear, offer advice and pitch in," Niedzviecki cautions. Rather, he says, it is inextricably linked to forces of bureaucracy, capitalism and law and order, forces that keep our society focused on the production and consumption of wealth. "Peep offers only the illusion of the village, only a facsimile of community."
Peep, which can instantly evoke images of transparency, transgression and totalitarianism, is all about contradictions, he concludes.
For good or ill, it's almost certainly unavoidable. "In the future," Niedzviecki writes, "not partaking in Peep culture may mean your disappearance. You'll be a living ghost; you'll move amongst the rest of us, but if we can't access your profile, we won't notice or care about you."
In The Peep Diaries, Hal Niedzviecki illuminates the landscape of Peep with acuity and clear-headed prose. An important topic. An important book.
[rc]
Don Butler is a senior writer at the Citizen.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Hal Niedzviecki
The Peep Diaries:
How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors
City Lights Publishers
$18.95
When Toronto social critic Hal Niedzviecki tracked his wife with a GPS device, he found the experience addictive. But not in a good way; it made him nervous and paranoid.
When, on her cycle to work, the Google Maps dot representing his wife stopped for five minutes, he feared the worst. She'd had an accident! She'd been hit by a truck!! Turned out she'd stopped to pick up a tuna sandwich at a bakery. But Niedzviecki didn't know that. And it made him crazy.
"I'm not feeling happier, and I'm not feeling safer," he writes in his unnerving new book, The Peep Diaries. "I'm feeling like the distance between what I know and don't know is greater than ever. I want video. I want to know exactly what she's doing when she's doing it."
If Niedzviecki is right -- and he presents a disturbingly compelling case -- more and more of us share the feeling. We want to know everything we can about everyone else, and we want everyone else to know almost everything about us.
Niedzviecki calls it Peep culture, and declares that it represents the most fundamental transformation of western society since the Industrial Revolution. Even allowing for authorial overstatement, it's clear that something consequential is happening here.
Peep was born of our fascination for celebrity, nourished by Hollywood, television and the whole apparatus of pop culture. It drew critical sustenance from reality TV, the best-established and arguably the only profitable Peep industry, which implanted the notion that even nobodies, at least briefly, can be celebrities. But it is our embrace of social networks and other Internet sharing sites that is turning Peep into an unstoppable force with potentially profound consequences.
Using FaceBook, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, chat rooms and blogs, we are indiscriminately sharing -- and too often "oversharing" -- thoughts and fears, triumphs and bad behaviour.
"We are creating public archives of the events of our lives like never before," Niedzviecki observes. "And what we innocently give away to the entire world has a hidden, potential value that most of us can't even imagine."
Corporations and institutions are using our willingness to share to turn our private information into what Niedzvieki calls "the final frontier of capitalism."All our opinions on a product, family snapshots and address changes are banked and assigned value, he argues. The information can determine such things as whether or not we get a job, a mortgage or a decent price on car insurance.
Peep culture, Niedzviecki argues, is our "twisted answer" to the need to proclaim our own existence in an era in which old links to family and community have largely collapsed. We are willing to reveal ourselves, even against our best interests, in the hope that we might, however briefly, alleviate the loneliness we feel.
Hardwired for social contact, we long, he says, for something we have lost: "Essential recognition of our humanness, intrinsic acknowledgement that we exist."
Surveillance, Niedzviecki argues, is conjoined with Peep culture. Both "share the idea that seeing all, knowing all, divulging all, is a good thing." And while the growth of surveillance worries a minority of the population, most of us are comfortable with it, the author says.
In part, that's because we've been conditioned by television, where surveillance is presented as an essential tool for catching bad guys, while keeping us thoroughly entertained.
"In the age of Peep," writes Niedzviecki, "we don't fear Big Brother, we clamour to be subjected to Big Brother. In fact, we want to be Big Brother."
Last year, 43 million people around the world -- triple the number in 2007 -- had location-based services on their cellphones. This year, Google launched Latitude, which shows users' locations on Google Maps to anyone they've invited to track them. Daycare surveillance is already widespread and may become de rigueur for parents.
In the near future, Niedzviecki predicts, millions more will start reflexively monitoring themselves, their loved ones, even their pets. What it amounts to, he says, is a North American civilization "in the full sway of a domestic surveillance renaissance."
We're not afraid of the surveillance state, he asserts. Rather, we fear its gaps.
"We fear the moments when, unobserved, unrecorded and unexhibited, we virtually disappear. We embrace surveillance because we're terrified of disappearing without a trace."
The statement is typical of Niedzviecki's penchant for making sweeping assertions without much empirical support. Still, his explanations for Peep's subliminal appeal make intuitive sense.
As with any social movement, Peep has been embraced by some who take the idea to its logical extreme. One such person is Padme, a B.C. woman whose Journey to the Darkside blog attracts upwards of 4,000 visits a day.
Padme, a stay-at-home mother, writes about her health and family life. But she also writes about her secret life, about her need to be dominated by her husband, whom she calls Master Anakin. Anakin's domination includes vermilion spankings and other masochistic sexual behaviour, all lovingly documented in videos, pictures and words on her blog.
Padme's hardly alone. Niedzviecki talks to "Beauty," a petite middle-aged mother who posts nude pictures of herself on a site called Voyeurweb, and later shares drinks with a band of seemingly ordinary empty-nesters who similarly expose their bodies and carnal couplings.
A site run by Maryland artist Frank Warren called PostSecret, which has collected and displayed 100,000 confessions anonymously sent in on postcards, is on the front lines of Peep, Niedzviecki writes. PostSecret has attracted more than 240 million visits to date.
According to Niedzviecki, Twitter represents the next stage in Peep's evolution. Twitter is all about revealing tiny secrets you'd otherwise keep from those who know you best. It feels, the author writes, as if you're talking to yourself. "It's a purer, more instantaneous form of Peep."
To understand Peep better, Niedzviecki embraced some of its methods. As well as tracking his wife, he tried out for a reality TV show, gathered information about his father from private detective websites and installed a surveillance camera overlooking the alley behind his house. (Nothing ever happened, but he found himself watching compulsively anyway.)
He also started a blog. Niedzviecki's blog posts about Peep Culture drew little interest. But relatively pedestrian material about raising his child or squabbling with his brother attracted a much greater response. His conclusion: "They wanted to read Hal on Hal."
As well, Niedzviecki joined Facebook, which, with more than 10 million members in Canada, is one of the great purveyors of Peep. After accumulating more than 700 "friends," he invited them to join him at a neighbourhood bar for conversations and drinks. Only one showed up.
People, Niedzviecki surmises, don't want to make the leap from virtual to real relationships. "We'd rather be at home peering at each other online than putting ourselves out there for friendship, messy emotional connection and all the responsibilities and frustrations that come with forming attachments to others."
By the book's end, Niedzviecki admits he still can't decide whether Peep's potential benefits outweigh its obvious vices.
In theory, Peep offers a culture of widespread democracy and equality. Peep isn't about how we're all turning into voyeurs, he insists. In fact, it's "a bold attempt to decentralize power, a grassroots campaign to return to individuals the capacity to tell their own stories about who they are and how they live."
But nor is Peep "some benevolent shtetl of like-minded, kindly villagers always willing to bend an ear, offer advice and pitch in," Niedzviecki cautions. Rather, he says, it is inextricably linked to forces of bureaucracy, capitalism and law and order, forces that keep our society focused on the production and consumption of wealth. "Peep offers only the illusion of the village, only a facsimile of community."
Peep, which can instantly evoke images of transparency, transgression and totalitarianism, is all about contradictions, he concludes.
For good or ill, it's almost certainly unavoidable. "In the future," Niedzviecki writes, "not partaking in Peep culture may mean your disappearance. You'll be a living ghost; you'll move amongst the rest of us, but if we can't access your profile, we won't notice or care about you."
In The Peep Diaries, Hal Niedzviecki illuminates the landscape of Peep with acuity and clear-headed prose. An important topic. An important book.
[rc]
Don Butler is a senior writer at the Citizen.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
