News About the Peep Diaries

news items about the Peep Diaries book

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!

 

Two Articles in Colombian Media

Two links to articles in Columbian magazine Semana which quote my ideas about Peep Culture.

Here’s an article on the rise of online-spying-as-entertainment:

original article here. as translated by google here.

And here’s an article about surveillance, crime prevention and what happens when shocking surveillance footage becomes entertainment:

original article here. as translated by google here.

The Danger of Sexy Texty Talk

Here’s a piece inspired by the Toronto City Councillor who had his private text messages made public by a scorned university student ex-lover who wasn’t too happy when he started running for mayor with his live-in girlfriend by his side. Anyway, I am quoted in the piece, which does a decent job of starting to look at the implications of everything we send getting permanently stored on some gadget somewhere.

 

Hal on Too Much Information Radio

You can listen to the bit I did for the New York based show Too Much Information WFMU 91.1 here. I talk about Peep and there’s other fun stuff on there like Baby Twitter and ruminations on Israel’s Metzitzim Beach.

Pacific Sun Review of Peep

Marin County newspaper review of Peep. Check it out here:

This is the last couple of sentences:

“And as the Peep Diaries discovers, the more we become connected by computers through our obsessions with “reality,” the more disconnected we become from reality. For anyone interested in what the last two decades have found us immersed in, Niedzviecki’s book is a must-read.”

The E-book as Argued on CBC Radio

I was on CBC Radio’s The Current this morning. You can download the podcast here.

I discussed/argued the e-book with journalist Noah Richler and David Kent, President of HarperCollins Canada. It was pretty entertaining. I was coming at it from the perspective of a writer, particularly one without the benefit at this current point in time of a publishing deal with a multinational corporate-owned publisher. (Interestingly enough, the producer who contacted me told me she was having trouble finding a writer willing to talk about e-books and publishing…)

So my take on it: small presses and independents are shut out of the chain bookstores that comprise the majority of the marketplace. Furthermore, even those writers who are published by a big company are finding themselves marginalized if they can’t generate significant sales. From that point of view, the e-book can only help writers who won’t find their books stacked up at Indigo or Barnes & Noble anytime soon. 

Obviously this is a complicated and divisive issue but I think the situation is relatively dire in terms of access — there are 10,000 plus books published every year in Canada alone, but how many of them will you see browsing through your Superstore? I think the ebook will benefit independents and small presses, and those writers who are increasingly finding for-profit publishing a difficult fit for what they want to achieve. And what about books that fall out of print in a shockingly short amount of time? Things can only get better for writers in terms of ongoing sustained access to the marketplace.

Peep a Book of the Year in Idaho!

A long list of “top books of the year” compiled by Steve Paul, a writer for The McClatchy Company group of American newspapers. The Peep Diaries is in there under nonfiction! I’m not sure where else this list appeared, but I found it on the Idaho Statesman website, so thanks Idaho!

What I Learned This Year: Peep in the Globe and Mail

A short piece discussing this summer’s live streaming 24 hour exposure experiment that appeared in the Globe and Mail.

End of the Decade Round-Ups Notice Peep

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.”

Peep is “Dark-Horse Nominee for Book of the Year”

William McKeen, chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism, has named The Peep Diaries his “Dark-Horse Nominee for Book of the Year” in his Book Blog on Florida’s The Daily Loaf.

He writes:

“This has been much on my mind lately because of The Peep Diaries (City Lights Books, $17.95) by Hal Niedzviecki (above). This book has preoccupied me since it came out in the summer and I’m wondering if it might end up being one of those prescient, influential books like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd. As everyone else starts the December look back at the year, this is my dark-horse nominee for most significant book of 2009.”

 

 

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...