hal tweets ·7:42 AM
A short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why Peep culture trumps privacy online. http://bit.ly/bQECsC
Exposure
2008,
17:28 GMT
Reality TV Night
Posted by: Hal
Just finished reality tv night. We watched one episode each of Intervention, The Moment of Truth and A Shot of Love With Tila Tequila. We watched them in that order. Lindsay came over to have dinner with us (I made spaghetti in tomato sauce with shrimp and scallops). Lindsay has just moved here from Montreal to work at the CBC. She’s also working with me on the Peep Culture CBC radio special. More on that as it develops. Anyway, Lindsay hadn’t seen any of these shows before so it was interesting to get her reaction.
The Intervention episode we watched featured a meth addict logger spiraling out of control as he struggled to deal with the death of his mother while his wife and kids looked on. It was pretty boring to start off, lots of interview testimonials about his background and problems. The wife had the best lines, stuff like: “His mind is a prison with many doors” and “Addiction is dragging this family into the grave.” But it doesn’t really pick up until we get right into it, with the logger and his wife fighting and the logger doing lines in his garage workshop and the kiddies crying. Every time logger snorted back another line of speed Lindsay and W would cringe. Eventually the Intervention happens and logger agrees to head off to a clinic for healing. Three months later he’s apparently all better and, as usual, there’s a quasi-happy ending. So why do we all feel so dirty?
The show I was most looking forward to was the one I hadn’t seen yet, the first episode of Moment of Truth, a new Fox venture. It’s eerily similar to a proposed ‘fake’ show I had suggested creating in various proposals for Peep Culture the book and documentary. My show was going to be called Your Deepest Secret and it was going to revolve around people’s willingness to confess secrets. The Fox show has a contestant and three guests – usually life partner, friend and family member. The contestant is asked personal questions and as they amass more money and move up levels, the questions get more and more pointed and personal. So it starts out with “Do you think you’re better looking than most guys your age?” and by level two it’s “Do you have something you don’t want your wife to know about.” The contestants have already been asked all these questions previously while hooked up to a lie detector test, so if they don’t answer the questions truthfully on TV a giant FALSE flashes above them and they lose. On the episode we watched a personal trainer who had already won $10,000 lost it all while his wife looked on when he denied sometimes touching his female clients more than necessary. FALSE!!! Wife cringed but you couldn’t tell if she was more upset about the money or about the revelations including one very amorphous admission that there were things he’d done he didn’t want his wife to know about.
Anyhooo…this show is the purest incarnation of the concept of Peep Culture I’d seen yet. There’s no claim of any kind of public benefit from watching this. It’s just pure peep. We’re just deriving entertainment from the normal everyday stuff of other people’s lives. Intervention at least claims to be showing people that they can and should overcome addiction. But Moment of Truth can’t really claim to be doing anything other than offering us 42 minutes of pure, delicious, squirmy, sleazy, supposed revelation.
For dessert we watched the final episode of A Shot of Love. We all knew she would pick the guy over the girl. Actually Lindsay kinda ruined it by revealing during dinner that her sister, a big fan, had already told her that she picks the guy and he dumps her a few months later. Still it was only the second episode I’d watched and the whole Springer-meets-Bachelor vibe of the show was momentarily compelling. At the end of the show Tila emerged to select the ‘winner’ wearing a frilly black party dress. W kept saying: she looks like a gremlin!
2008,
18:09 GMT
Veggies on film
Posted by: Hal
okay, i’m spending the day doing data entry. i’ve got hundreds of articles that relate in some way to peep culture. they all need to get sorted and entered so i can get on with the thinking and writing. in a way, this is a way of thinking and writing. anyway, here’s my favourite article so far. It’s about a fruit and vegetable processing plant that keeps its produce under surveillance. It suggests just how extensive monitoring is — they even provide their customers with video updates! Overkill or saving lives and time?
2008,
17:58 GMT
Bad Boys, Bad Boys
Posted by: Hal
Interesting piece in the Washington Post – For 20 Years, a Pleasure So Guilty It’s Criminal – about the 20th anniversary of pioneer Reality TV show Cops. I remember watching that when I was younger thinking that it was as low as tv could get. How wrong I was. The article spends a bit too much time acting as publicity for the upcoming best of Cops anniversary DVD and too little time ruminating on the impact Cops has had on television in particular and society in general. Still worth checking out. Particularly notable is the fact that more than 90% of the people arrested on camera agree to sign the release that gives the makers of the show permission to use their footage. Wow.
2008,
14:55 GMT
Google Pilot Project to Store Health Records
Posted by: Hal
Here’s an interesting bit of news reported by AP – Google to Store Health Records. Many people already immediately go to Google after they get back from the doctor with a diagnosis of everything from depression to cancer to cataracts. So there’s a kind of weird logic to it. It also theoretically makes sense to have our health records online so that any doctor anywhere could access them, though the image of the doc in the ER surfing your records is a weird one, hmmm…okay…allergic to nuts, ah, and here’s his blog and his online dating profile…interesting stuff he’s into, better check him for STDs while I’m at it…anyway, okay, you get the picture. The big point here is that it’s now time for us to think of some better system of making this potentially life saving info available other than 3rd party for-profit corporations who make a profit off, at least in part, reselling information about us. In Canada, for instance, where medicine is provided by the provinces, some kind of standardized government system could be imagined that 1) provides this service to everyone regardless of their access to the internet and their ability to sign up for a Google account and 2) doesn’t link it to everyday activities like logging in to your gmail. I mean how many people leave their email account open throughout the day? Overall, though, there are so many problems with how to keep this kind of material private and strictly between doctor and patient I’m frankly amazed that Google is even going there.
2008,
17:25 GMT
Seedy CNN peep!
Posted by: Hal
Some good peep material on CNN today. first up, we’ve got a “news” report on a nanny mishandling 7 month old twins. needless to say, there is ample nannycam footage showing the twins being swung around and left to fend for themselves on the couch. the actual public need to see this material is somewhat doubtful though the reporter tries to salvage her credibility by ending with something about how the mom wants other families to know that they can also get nannycams and bust their caregivers.
Next up, a couple of minutes of security camera school bus action featuring what is proudly advertised as a school bus brawl. Watch burly bus driver lady and burly teens pull hair. Again, there’s an attempt to pretend this is news, not voyeurism, by ending the segment with a 4 second clip of a mom saying something like, “I’m shocked.”
I’m not.
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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