End of the Decade Round-Ups Notice Peep

Posted by Hal
Tags: blogging, surveillance, exposure, news, personal, peep-the-game, peep-radio, hals-life

A couple of interesting articles the review the decade from a Canadian perspective and cite the rise of Peep Culture.

In the National Post, there’s

Out with the Aughts: The end of privacy

which offers a pretty good round-up of some of the pop culture influences that encouraged us to tell all all the time, from Lewinsky to Reality TV to social media.

Here’s a sample: Ms. Lewinsky’s craving for attention and eagerness to tell all was a pre-cursor of what Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki has labeled peep culture. “To come in contact with it is to be overcome with the urge to want to see everything and, in turn, want other people to see our everything,” Mr. Niedzviecki writes in his 2009 Oprah-plugged book, The Peep Diaries. “In this way we restate the terms of privacy, community, individuality, and even society. Even as we hide in gated communities and cancel out the world via the preprogrammed earbuds of our cell phone/MP3 players, we show and tell all on our blog, our various ‘my pages,’ in the photos and videos we upload, on television, and anywhere else we can think of.”

Peep also gets a nod in a CanWest News Service article,

A war that defined a decade

The headline is a bit misleading as the piece isn’t only about Afghanistan’s legacy for Canada, but big trends in Canadian society over the last decade generally. These include everything from the Afghan war to Maher Arar to Mike Weir, Steve Nash and, of course, the rise of Peep: 

Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki calls our online obsessions the new “peep culture” and describes the phenomenon in his new book, The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours. “We’ve gone from entertaining ourselves by watching celebrities perform to watching each other go about our regular lives,” he said in a recent interview. “Canada has a ton of Facebook users, Twitter users and an extraordinary number of bloggers. We love to review and comment, and we’re very active in creating virtual broadcasts about ourselves.

“And this is one of the ironies about Canadian society in general, especially if you look at the decade. Even as we cling to a rural, small-town, wilderness-dominated vision of Canada, the reality is that we are one of the most digital, wired, urbanized countries in the world, with, if anything, an institutionalized contempt for nature.”

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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...

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