The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors: Amazon.ca: Hal Niedzviecki: Books

Quill & Quire

Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki has a hard time coming up with good, solid conclusions in his new book, The Peep Diaries. He admits as much in the last chapter. He thought that by the end of his investigation into what he calls “Peep culture” he would be able to take a firmly pro- or anti-Peep stance, but he can’t. All he can say is that people should be free to choose how much or how little of their lives they make available via social networking sites, blogs, or reality TV. Niedzviecki shouldn’t be criticized for this lack of groundbreaking conclusions. Making definitive pronouncements about how technology – particularly new media – will affect society in the future may help sell books, but it’s a fool’s game (see Arianna Huffington, Jeff Jarvis, et al.). In the absence of any earth-shattering thesis, The Peep Diaries is essentially an entertaining journalistic trip into the simultaneously mundane and unfathomable world of people who post nude photos of themselves on voyeur websites and families who volunteer for wife-swapping reality TV shows. One of the problems with the book is that Niedzviecki’s definition of Peep culture is so broad that it seems, at times, to reach too far for examples. In one passage, he stretches to describe Morgan Spurlock’s movie Super Size Me as a “must-watch example of the Peep culture documentary.” After all of the references to touchstones of Peep culture (MTV’s The Hills, Second Life, Facebook, etc.) and scholars past (Max Horkheimer) and present (Charles Taylor), Niedzviecki left out one potentially helpful name. Perhaps it’s a little too obvious, but in some ways the “combination of hyper-individualist excess, cutthroat capitalist self-preservation, longing for lost community, and our inherited hardwired need to make sense of life through narrative” that helped foment the culture Niedzviecki chronicles sounds similar to the conditions that French sociologist Emile Durkheim observed when he coined the term anomie during a much earlier era of technological change. Or maybe not. It’s always best to leave the pop theorizing to others.

Book Description

“Take a peek at The Peep Diaries, an erudite (but not too erudite) look at the culture that Facebook, Twitter, et al. have spawned.”—Real Simple

“It’s a great read; it mixes frank interviews with people pushing the boundaries of voyeurism and exhibitionism, alongside a bracing critique of the social context that got us into peep culture and the forces that now exploit our participation in it.”—The Globe and Mail

We have entered the age of "peep culture": a tell-all, show-all, know-all digital phenomenon that is dramatically altering notions of privacy, individuality, security, and even humanity. Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, over-the-counter spy gear, blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn, surveillance technology, Dr. Phil, Borat, cell phone photos of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and more. In the age of peep, core values and rights we once took for granted are rapidly being renegotiated, often without our even noticing.

With hilarious, exasperated acuity, social critic Hal Niedzviecki dives into peep, starting his own video blog, joining every social network that will have him, monitoring the movements of his toddler, selling his secrets on Craigslist, hiring a private detective to investigate him, spying on his neighbors, trying out for reality TV shows, and stripping for the pleasure of a web audience he isn’t even sure exists. Part travelogue, part diary, part meditation and social history, The Peep Diaries explores a rapidly emerging digital phenomenon that is radically changing not just the entertainment landscape, but also the firmaments of our culture and society.

The Peep Diaries introduces the arrival of the age of peep culture and explores its implications for entertainment, society, sex, politics, and everyday life. Mixing first-rate reporting with sociological observations culled from the latest research, this book captures the shift from pop to peep and the way technology is turning gossip into documentary and Peeping Toms into entertainment journalists. Packed with stranger-than-fiction true-life characters and scenarios, The Peep Diaries reflects the aspirations and confusions of the growing number of people willing to trade the details of their private lives for catharsis, attention, and notoriety.

Hal Niedzviecki is the editor of Broken Pencil magazine and has published numerous works of social commentary and fiction, including Hello I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity.

About the Author

Hal Niedzviecki's writings on culture have appeared in newspapers and magazines across North America. He is the founder of Broken Pencil, a magazine covering zine culture and the indie arts. In addition to three novels and a story collection, Niedzviecki is the author of Hello, I'm Special and We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture.

The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors [Paperback]

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About the Author