News About the Peep Diaries

news items about the Peep Diaries book

Peep on AOLNews  

Hey everyone, here’s a short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why, despite all the warnings about privacy online, we just can’t bring ourselves to care nearly as much as we should. 

A taste: “Oh but haven’t recent polls demonstrated that we are more concerned than ever about our privacy online? Sure they have. But they have also shown that our concern doesn’t actually translate into action. We may tell pollsters we are concerned about our privacy, but we don’t actually do much about it. Surprisingly few of us can actually be bothered to adjust the privacy settings available to us. (A Pew Research Study put the number of us who change Facebook privacy settings in the 25 percent to 44 percent range, which is to say that not even half of us are motivated to protect our most intimate details by taking five minutes to click a few buttons.)”

Read in full:

Syndney Herald article ruminates on Facebook and Peep  

Pretty interesting article in the Sydney Herald (Australia) called “Peep show can claim a price”.  Riffs off the ideas of Peep Culture and is inspired by the largely utterly failed Quit Facebook Day way back in May. The article concludes: “Facebook might have been deceptive about its use of our personal information, but we were already captivated by the peep show of our own lives.”

Tech website column on Peep  

Ieee Spectrum Inside Technology column discusses the rise of Peep Culture and wonders: Peep culture may be the new pop culture, but is this really a two-way mass phenomenon? Maybe most of us have an audience of one: ourselves.

Peep in the London Review of Books  

The Peep Diaries is described as a “bracingly informal book” in a 5 book essay/review that appeared in the recent issue of the London Review of Books. Check out the whole piece here. The other books discussed are

The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook by Ben Mezrich
The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future by Craig Watkins
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin
The Tyranny of Email: The Four Thousand Year Journey to your Inbox by John Freeman

Turkish Edition of Peep Diaries  

…is now available. Apparently it is doing well and has been reviewed by 4 newspapers. If you read Turkish, you can read a review of the book in the newspaper Radikal here.

What follows are the first couple of sentences:

Gündelik hayatta yaşananların mutlaka kavramsal karşılığı vardır. Bu karşılık ya hazırdır yada olayların olgu derecesine yükselmesiyle oluşur. Dil zorlanır. Dil kımıldar. Tam da Deniz Baykal örneğinden hareket edildiğinde, nesnenin özne karşısındaki zaferinden söz edilebilir.

Enjoy!

 

My Reaction to Reaction Videos Article in Washington Post

Actually the headline should read: My reaction to the Reaction Videos article in the Washington Post that quotes my reaction to Reaction Videos. Got that?

Well, it doesn’t really matter. Check out the article, the piece does a nice job with the whole reaction video phenomenon. My take on it gets mocked (see the end of the piece), but I probably deserve it.

Leah McLaren Gets Nostalgic for Her Landline…

…and I help her column in Toronto’s Globe and Mail along with a few ideas about what the landline represents and why she’s feeling nostalgic even as most of the world is moving toward doing away with the home phone altogether. Read the piece here.

Las Vegas TV Explores Surveillance Society with Hal

LasVegasNow.com recently did a special segment on Living in the Surveillance Society. I comment throughout. You can read the article and watch the two 4 minute videos here. It’s well done  and their conclusion is important, if slightly vague – “Users sacrifice privacy, getting the power of the Internet in return.” What I wonder is if “users” even see giving up privacy as a “sacrifice”? And what, exactly, do they (we) get in return?

 

Column on Overshare and the “hazards of peep culture”

It’s by Sofi Papamarko and it was in Metro News, a series of free subway papers across Canada. You can read it here.

Hello, Stranger: AP article on ChatRoulette

This piece released by wire service AP quotes me extensively about ChatRoulette and how it fits into the rise of Peep Culture.

Here’s a sample: ‘‘Chatroulette is stark because it feels like television. It’s like sitting in front of the TV flipping channels, except the people are real,’’ says Hal Niedzviecki, author of ‘‘The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors.’‘

It appeared in the New York Times, The LA Times and a hundred or so other places!

 

The Book: The Peep Diaries

The Peep Diaries will be Published by City Lights Books in May 2009
ISBN 1991022

Buy The Peep Diaries Right Now:
In the United States: www.citylights.com
In Canada: Chapters/Indigo Amazon:

The Publisher: City Lights

City Lights Books

City Lights Publishers

In June of 1955, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Bookstore, launched City Lights Publications with the Pocket Poets Series. The first volume was a collection of his own poems, Pictures of the Gone World, which has since become a classic of beat literature and… more...

Author! Author!

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, culture commentator and editor whose work challenges preconceptions and confronts readers with the offenses of everyday life. He is the author of six books including the novel The Program and the nonfiction book The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves… more...