News About the Peep Diaries

news items about the Peep Diaries book

Globe Columnist Explores Tiger and Peep

Today Judith Timson of the Globe and Mail ruminated on what l’affaire Tiger and the general fascination we have collectively with watching other people’s lives through various mass media portals (particularly if they are celebrities and particularly if things are going badly). She adeptly points out the various contradictions at the heart of peep: that a CNN poll had 78% of respondents agreeing that Tiger Woods “has the right to privacy” even as the details of what he does he does when he’s not golfing are the hottest thing going on every media outlet on the planet. And you can bet if you’re watching CNN and taking its online polls, you’re not turning it off when it’s time for the Tiger Report.

Timson goes on to directly cite The Peep Diaries, writing that

Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries, has described this culture as one of “mass voyeurism in which we get more and more of our kicks from peeping in on the entertaining foibles of the real lives of others; at the same time, we become more and more amenable to others peeping in on our lives.” But do we viscerally understand that this could represent the end of privacy as we know it? Parents post a YouTube video of their adorable little boy comically coming out of anesthesia after a dental appointment and it becomes a huge hit. Women start up sites bashing unfaithful boyfriends. University kids post endless drunk and happy pics of themselves.

Timson concludes, as I do, that in fact far too few of us make the connection between what is now our primary source of entertainment – other people’s real lives – and the way peep changes us. She’s mostly concerned about privacy and how we are unwittingly forsaking it, but I’d say we can go deeper than that: peep is reshaping us in myriad ways from our sense of privacy to what we value in our society to how we perceive ourselves and other human beings.

 

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...