hal tweets ·1:04 PM
Indie comics in 80s LA, a homage featuring Groening, Panter, Hernandez bros…. http://bit.ly/b1FcGM
2008,
0:44 GMT
Max Mosley and UK's anti-Peep law
Posted by: Hal
It’s anti-Peep, not pro-privacy. That’s my take on the news that Max Mosley, Formula One boss who sued the Daily News after they paid a prostitute to hide a camera in her bra while she took part in his bondage and domination orgy, has won a judgment in the case.
Why do I say anti-Peep? Because what the judge essentially says in the ruling is that, to quote the New York Times, “the ‘unconventional’ behavior that tabloid journalists in Britain have regularly chronicled among certain celebrities — adultery, for example, or visiting a prostitute — would have to involve, in the future, some element of criminality, or activity conflicting starkly with the public image fostered by the individuals involved.”
In other words, you can Peep, but only in the public interest. This isn’t a resounding defence of the right to privacy, it’s a reigning in and defining of the right to Peep. The two are not the same thing. One says, paying someone to sneak a camera into a private orgy that breaks no laws is okay so long as you find out, for instance, that it’s a NAZI-themed orgy, which is, presumably news because Mosely is the son of famously fascist parents and a major public figure. But if he’s just doing a regular old spanking orgy, well, then, the public doesn’t need to know about that. So in that case, you should just forget all about the camera you snuck into the orgy. It’s not that you shouldn’t have snuck in the camera, it’s that having failed to record sufficiently smutty and shocking material, you should have deleted the pictures and forgotten all about it.
A strange, twisted bit of law making that says more about the age of Peep culture than it does privacy.
Mosley after court, surrounded by reporters.
The original Daily News front page.
2008,
14:18 GMT
Snitch Update: James follows Hal/Brother tracks Hal in Moment of (semi) Crisis
Posted by: Hal
Here’s text from my friend James, who has been following me online via the GPS Snitch which fits in my pocket and tracks me wherever I go:
Hal is on the move – its 2:30, I’ve over slept from a nap, so if missed his departure.
currently Hal is heading NE at 30km/hour by King & University (strangely I am home, but I work right by there – bad timing for a Hal spotting)
Hal is obviously heading east at the moment, located at Church and Carlton – heading to the rainbow cinemas? But its such a nice day.
I’m not sure what he’s doing now – he’s headed way out, and is either on car or speedy bike and is past Carlton / Yonge….. what are you up to Hal?
Hal has parked himself at Heydon st. A boring st if there ever was one, but something has caught his attention enough to stop his travels.
Hal, at 2:58, now, according to the GPS, is on the railroad tracks….. I think he’s in trouble. But apparently still traveling only 0 km/hr.
3:24 error in locating snitch – something is definitely up
Pretty funny stuff. Thanks James! Of course in reality I was dropping zines off at the Toronto Reference Library where my magazine Broken Pencil helps add to the periodic growth of the zine collection. I was also dropping off 3 boxes of books, doing some grocery shopping, and otherwise running a few other errands. So there you go. Someone asked in a comment last week how I felt about being tracked. Truth is, the person being tracked doesn’t really pay attention or even notice. It’s the person who is tracking who does the work and generally has, as you can see from above, all kinds of different reactions. When I was tracking W., I felt mainly paranoia and anxiety. Now that I’m being tracked by James and my brother, I don’t feel, really, anything.
One other interesting thing about being tracked on Friday: Not long after I left the house to run my errands, my mom went to the hospital after experiencing some scary symptoms. Naturally, my dad called both me and my brother. My brother was at work, plus he has a cell phone. I was driving around, and I don’t have a cellphone. My brother tracked me to the aforementioned Heyden Street (just north of Yonge and Bloor) and told me later that since he was soon to be in that area, he actually contemplated looking for me there. In the end, he just left several messages for me and then yelled at me for not having a cell when I finally got home and called him back. So, in this case, Snitch provided some interesting possibilities: it’s less intrusive than a cell since the user just has to carry it around passively, it never demands that you answer it or check up on it. But it still gives you some modicum of connection to the rest of the world. So long as Snitch is in your pocket, if someone really has to find you, they will. It wasn’t really a major emergency: mom lives in the Washington DC area, so it’s not as if I would have been able to rush to the hospital anyway. And, luckily, after spending the weekend in hospital she’s back home now and it seems like she’s going to be fine.
2008,
20:14 GMT
My Brother Does Snitch
Posted by: Hal
Just noticed my brother isn’t where he’s supposed to me. He’s moved from his office to somewhere in the King and Adelaide area. What’s he doing down there? He’s just joined a gym and apparently he’s pretty obsessed with it, so maybe that’s where his gym is? Anyway, gotta find out. Yes, I’m tracking my brother via the GPS Snitch Blip program which lets people with GPS enabled Blackberrys share their location and track each other. He is also tracking me on his Blackberry and online, following me as I move around with the Snitch. He was very curious what I was doing at the Moss Park Armory for two hours yesterday. I didn’t want to tell him, but finally admitted I was playing hockey. If anyone else wants to follow me, get in touch via email and I’ll set you up.
Speaking of my brother, a few people have asked about how things are between us after my post about refusing to go to his house because he refuses to go to mine. Before I give an update on that, I’d like to just note that it’s really interesting because the people who asked me if I was still squabbling with my brother were friends/acquaintances with which I would never discuss my relationship with my brother normally. But since they read the blog, they are privy to the info and I guess they felt there was nothing wrong with bringing it up face to face, since I’d already shared on the subject. These are the kind of weird things you notice when you blog about your personal life.
Now for the brother update: on Sunday I’m supposed to go canoeing with him and his 3 kids. I’ll have to drop by his house to transfer to the mini-van, but even if I go inside for a minute, it doesn’t count. The cold war continues. Other than that, our relationship is pretty much the same as always. We only actively fight every month or so, which isn’t that much when you consider we talk on the phone almost every day. The house thing is a power struggle that has to do with how he tries to dictate everything about how, when and where our family gets together, which I find really annoying. Anyway, I know he’s reading this, he eventually got around to leaving a passive aggressive comment the first time I blogged about it. So we’ll see what he has to say. In the meantime, E.‘s 3rd birthday is coming up and this year we’re gonna have a family gathering. Guess where it’ll be? Yeah, you got it. My place.
2008,
19:57 GMT
Wanna Track Hal?
Posted by: Hal
Hey out there. I'm looking for a few people who are interested in tracking me on my GPS Snitch. Basically I would send you an invite and you would log in and monitor my whereabouts for a few days. You'd keep a little journal about where you saw me go and your impressions about using the device and send them to me. If anyone out there wants to do this, give me a shout at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Next week or so, it's track Hal on Snitch!
2008,
18:41 GMT
Hal Needs New Friends Event—Final Thoughts
Posted by: Hal
So thanks to everyone who took the trouble to comment on the previous post which tells the sort of sad tale of my Hal Needs New Friends Night (long story short – one person showed up).
Since that night I’ve been communicating with the people who said they were coming or maybe coming and didn’t show, and otherwise talking to people about the event and asking them what they think happened. From all this discussion as well as from the comments posted to the blog, I’ve settled on three main interlocking reasons for why (leaving out for now the possibility of my general lameness) no one showed up.
First, people say they’ll come or say maybe they’ll come but they don’t feel any actual obligation to attend – “definitely attending” on Facebook seems to mean “maybe” and “maybe attending” seems to mean probably not though I like the idea of attending, just not the actual process of having to go through the tiresome ordeal of showing up somewhere. Writes one of the “Maybes”: “Hi Hal, It’s funny because I often say ‘maybe’ I’ll come to things when I can’t come. I’d have liked to come to meet you but I live in BC. Saying I’m not coming always seems so final…So I usually say Maybe.” Another person who said they were definitely coming wrote me to say they were going to come but they live an hour’s drive away add “gas…you know.” Now obviously if you can’t afford the gas, I understand that, but it’s not as if the price of gasoline changed so dramatically in the week between that person said she was coming and the day of the actual event. So I’ll chalk it up to the “probably not but there’s a slight chance I’ll be around maybe” unique to the world of Facebook.
The second thing I realized: people are busy. They barely have time for their old friends, let alone time to make new ones. They’ve got jobs, hobbies, things to do, places to go. Life gets in the way. One “maybe” told me that instead of coming out she played Wig and smoked a joint at her boyfriend’s friend’s place. She made it sound way more exciting than anything I could have ever come up with: “We smoked some killer weed…then the games began. I virtually bowled, boxed my man (and won) played a Lego version of Indiana Jones, walked a tightrope. It was pretty nifty.” A fellow had a job interview the next morning. Another “maybe” was going to come but decided against it because she had to work in the morning. Another maybe ended up having ultimate Frisbee night and a confirmed attendee bailed out to go, of all things, to the George Michael concert. (Can’t compete with that…I guess.) A “maybe” spent his evening returning tiles he bought for his basement that his wife nixed as too expensive: “So, I had to haul back 25 boxes of heavy tiles, bring down to the basement, one box at a time, and carry back the other boxes of tiles which were already in the basement, load them up in the car, drive to Home Depot and get my money back.” We’re so busy working and scheduling and renovating (both our virtual and cyber properties) we barely have time to breath, let alone make new friends. I think it’s fair to argue that many people are stressed and tired and constantly on the go – our society does not reward leisure and does not encourage us to make time to meet new people in our community.
Finally, and this is certainly related to the other two phenomenon, there’s the question of social anxiety and awkwardness. Just as my one friend Paula almost didn’t come because she felt weird walking into a bar alone to meet a stranger, several people reported that they intended to come but in the end just couldn’t muster up the courage. Writes a “maybe”: “I wanted to go, and had plans to attend with my friend. When she bailed, I didn’t have enough confidence to go on my own. Sad but true. I can and do travel alone, go to movies and restaurants alone, attend literary and gallery events, and do a myriad of other things alone. But going to a bar alone to meet a stranger who obviously already has a terribly fascinating cabal of friends I just didn’t feel I had the social stamina for.” Extrapolate from this kind of comment and you could make the argument that people are, in fact, more likely to attend an “event” they are invited to via Facebook then accept an invitation to a personal encounter. An event is anonymous. You don’t commit, you don’t extend yourself, don’t feel like there’s someone on the other end judging you. An event, like a night at home watching tv or surfing other people’s pages, is far less of a trial than a non-event involving actually having to meet and engage with other people in real life. The more disengaged we are, the more comfortable we feel. This is, surely, one of the consequences of Peep culture. Or you could flip it around and put it this way: The more we learn to “engage” with each other through mediated environments, the less comfortable we are just meeting up. “Meeting you would make you ‘real’,” noted a perceptive comment posted on this blog. “They would have an emotional connection which brings in all that emotional baggage like guilt (for not following Twitter, skipping your blog a few times, etc.).” In other words, it’s far less complicated to peep from a distance. In other words, all this social media might actually create distance and a reluctant to meet than a desire to meet.
In the end, people were generally mortified for me. Several expressed true repentance, at least two people sent me their phone numbers and told me I should call them if I still wanted to hang out, and many people promised (albeit vaguely) to buy me a beer when and if our paths crossed in the future. Everyone felt if not sorry for me, then sorry for how the night turned out and for their role in being one of those people just a little too busy, too distant, too unsure, to attend. People are kind and caring (from a distance). It’s just that life, the way our lives are structured and organized, gets in the way.
The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
Indie comics in 80s LA, a homage featuring Groening, Panter, Hernandez bros…. http://bit.ly/b1FcGM
Issue 47 (spring) is now completely ‘unlocked’ on the NEW Broken Pencil website. Web TV, Liz Worth on punk TO & more http://bit.ly/bXvQuP
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