hal tweets ·7:42 AM
A short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why Peep culture trumps privacy online. http://bit.ly/bQECsC
2009,
14:04 GMT
Doc Update: Hal gets phone and other adventures
Posted by: Hal
So the second official day of shooting for the documentary happened a few days back. Here’s what we did:
Filmed me (pretending) to take out the trash. Filmed me watering the garden, stirring my compost bin (nice assortment of worms and grubs in there…). Filmed me (pretending) to watch tv on the couch.
The idea was to establish my relative normalcy, my basic reticence, the general sense that I am not someone who generally makes a big spectacle spewing my emotions and private moments all over the place. This is true and I tried not to ham it up, and just be natural, though Director Sally kept accusing me of mugging for the camera so I’m not sure how successful I was. The culmination of this was a 40 minute on camera interview where Sally lobbed questions at me, asking to defend the project, and commented on the fact that many people she’d talked to about me referred to my abruptness and incivility. (Your point Sally?)
The day went quickly and suddenly it was 4 o’clock and we were in a time crunch to get things done – the crew had a bunch of interviews scheduled with my brother and some of my friends (again to establish my baseline normalcy and lack thereof). Frantic rescheduling on everyone’s part and we were off to the food court shopping area downtown underneath the TD Center.
At the Wireless Wave store next to the Laura Secord, we filmed a scene where I pretended to enquire about a cell phone. I was just pretending because the cell had already been picked out and activated by producer Jeanette. The Wireless Wave guy was a bit nervous but got into it after the first take. He showed me the features and advised me against doing things like Twitter and signing up for Google Latitude. Yeah right! I’m pretty sure Sally liked that part. The core of the scene was true: it is my first ever cell phone and I’m not particularly excited about having it and I have only a slight notion of how to work it so far.
On the way out the camera and sound guys harassed the girl closing down the Laura Secord into giving them free cones of maple walnut ice cream.
Next scene, a park in the Annex where I fiddled with my phone. I couldn’t actually figure out how to send a Twitter so I ended up pretending to send a Twitter at Sally’s instruction. The fake Twitter claimed to say “I am in the park.” Watching this was a group of 12 year-olds on skate-boards. Kids: “Are you filming a commercial?” Sally: “No a documentary” Kids: “What about?” Sally: “It’s about, uh, cell phones and stuff.” Kids: “Oh.” They promptly departed.
Somehow all this activity took us to 8:30 at night. I hurried home to find W trying to put E. to bed. We all lay down in E’s bed together and fell asleep.
2009,
14:08 GMT
Notes from Last Night’s Reading
Posted by: Hal
Among those in attendance at my presentation last night on the third floor of the sprawling Harvard Coop bookstore:
*Three black men of retiree age who spoke with African accents. One of them asked me if any of this stuff was going on in the Muslim countries. Another of them asked if he could watch the presentation again, so I started it again and the three of them sat down in front of my netbook and watched the whole thing again while snacking from stuff they brought with them in plastic containers.
*One fiery youngish academic who noted that while my presentation was very interesting and provocative I was mostly wrong about everything.
*An undergraduate activist girl who was of the opinion that activists were successfully using social networks to galvanize young people for the cause of social justice.
*An older gentleman with, I think, white hair in a pony-tail who came up to the podium afterwards, thanked me, and gave me three bananas and a small bag of all dressed bagel chips.
*A middle aged fellow who suggested that we were looking at a total shift in what it means to be social.
*A woman in her fifties who looked away whenever the screen showed something particularly upsetting like the naked wizard being tazered, a woman being spanked, or a woman revealing her abdomen days after gastric bypass surgery. She later spoke elegantly and thoughtfully about how much this whole phenomenon disturbed her.
*A Boston Facebook friend I’d never met before. He declined my offer to buy him a beer after the presentation.
2009,
13:24 GMT
Jon and Kate Monday Debut: Disgust and Fascination
Posted by: Hal
According to the New York Times, the Monday night debut of Jon and Kate plus Eight was the most popular primetime show over Memorial Weekend. 10 million tuned in. Thousands commented on the show as it transpired, extending their peep entertainment through Twitter and Facebook conduits. There are now entire blogs devoted to the show – check out Gosselins Don’t Need Our Pity, which should be doing a pretty thriving business these days. I dropped by expecting debate on whether or not the couple are using their helpless kids to enhance their profiles and fortunes, but it’s more like US Weekly – which has featured the couple on the cover of the mag for the LAST FIVE ISSUES. I didn’t manage to catch the show but thanks to all the recaps and blogs, I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything. Peep Culture is now indisputably the most prevalent entertainment trend. And the moral implications are finally starting to make people a bit queasy: we are watching with disgusted fascination.
2009,
14:13 GMT
Is Surveillance Worth the Social Cost? Article in the National Post
Posted by: Hal
Here’s a really interesting and well written article, complete with a healthy dose of snark and skepticism. The piece is called Are We All Big Brother Now? and, written by one of newspaper’s news reporters, a guy who spends plenty of time on the crime beat, it has a refreshing no nonsense look at the ideas I espouse in my book.
Here are two paragraphs from the piece:
As such, the flawed footage was typical of how CCTV plays out in major crimes, as a crucial but incomplete piece of the puzzle. But the other factors, especially the frantic speculation about the case on dedicated Facebook sites, also typify an emerging culture of democratized digital surveillance, in which security and entertainment have blurred into voyeurism, usually with the narcissistic consent of the surveilled.
This “Peep Culture,” according to Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki, is what happens when pop culture’s mass audience gains the tools to display themselves online as celebrities, with their private lives on enthusiastic display. But with time, it spreads beyond the time-passing frivolity of social networking into the most deadly serious corners of the culture.”
I liked the way this piece approached, without any sentimentality, the question of whether or not surveillance and self surveillance are worth the price that we ultimately have to pay as individuals and a society.
2009,
15:47 GMT
Documentary Update: Hal in the Shower
Posted by: Hal
Tuesday was the first official day of documentary shooting. The idea for this first day was just to show my relatively mundane boring life, pre-peep. I got E. dressed, the whole family had breakfast (actually our second breakfast since this was around 10 am and E. wakes up at precisely 6 every morning (why! why!). It was all fairly painless and, in that weird, they’re paying so much attention to me way, kinda fun.
Then it came time for me to get ready to go to the CBC to do a pre-book launch interview, and on to the Peep book launch from there. I was commanded to strip to my boxers. Sally Blake (who’s directing) wanted me to shave but at the last minute I realized I had no shaving cream. (I hadn’t been planning to shave before the launch, preferring the 2 days growth hipster look I’d been planning for months…) Sorry Sally! I felt weirdly like I’d let everyone down. We settled for me pretending to trim my nose and eyebrow hairs. (Weirdly enough, W. had spontaneously attacked my nose hairs earlier that day, so there wasn’t really much left to go at.)
Anyway, eventually I ended up in the shower with the camera crew and Sally filming through and over the opaque glass. I thought I would feel embarrassed but it didn’t really bother me all that much. The world had better watch out: my hairy back is coming to a small screen near you.
I washed my hair for about 10 minutes. At first they weren’t happy with the quantity of lather, so I had to take that up a notch by randomly grabbing one of W.’s “volumizing” shampoos and really going to town.
note the back hair!
When it was finally done, I primly strolled over to the bedroom wrapped in a towel and selected and donned my launch outfit while the cameras looked on.
Hal pre-peep was quickly merging with Hal in peepland, me thinks.
Overall, the whole experience was more boring than anything else. It was basically me doing what I normally do, though not necessarily at that particular time or in that exact way. Basically what we shot was Hal performing Hal.
Sally’s take on this – over on her part of the site – is that I’ll stop being so self conscious once I forget the cameras are there. I guess that’s the thing – will I ever manage to forget the cameras are there? Do I want to?
what’s up sally? you seeing something you don’t like?
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...
A short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why Peep culture trumps privacy online. http://bit.ly/bQECsC
New content on the Broken Pencil website! Short fiction: Shack the Clam Girl + How to Make Your Own Game Cabinet http://bit.ly/b6CHLP
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