hal tweets ·7:42 AM
A short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why Peep culture trumps privacy online. http://bit.ly/bQECsC
Gawker
2008,
17:45 GMT
Gawk This: Emily Gould Learns the Art of Peep
Posted by: Hal
Okay it’s a little late and nobody cares anymore, but what the hell. Here’s my take on the whole Emily Gould/NewYork Times/Gawker/blogger “scandal.”
So Emily Gould obviously knew that she was overstepping boundaries of privacy and proprietary when she was blogging about private matters involving other people’s lives without their consent. She was clearly doing it to advance her career and persona, and admits as much in her New York Times essay on her life as a blogger, when she talks about inserting personal asides into Gawker posts as a way to draw attention to her writing and get more hits. This is actually pretty common strategy these days: As a reporter notes in a piece on people blogging their divorces: “For some ex-spouses, revenge is not the point. Writing about divorce can be good for readership.” This theory is affirmed by one Penelope Trunk, the author of the Brazen Careerist blog, who has spent quite a bit of time writing about the demise of her 15 year marriage. “The bloggers who are doing the best are those who are injecting their personal lives,” she notes, presumably meaning that the value of your product – your story as told by you – is enhanced by scandal and tragedy so why hold back?
Let’s put this in context: A Pew American Life/Internet Project reports that 1 in 10 adult Americans has a blog. At the same time, another study by Fernanda Viegas out of M.I.T. interviewed nearly 500 bloggers and found that more than a third of the respondents said they had ‘‘gotten in trouble’‘ for material posted on their blog. Another third said that they knew other bloggers who had gotten into trouble with family and friends. Bloggers who admitted to frequently writing about ‘‘highly personal materials’‘ got into the most trouble most frequently. As one mournful fellow explaining, ‘‘I lost a prospective girlfriend, who found that I’d blogged a brief amount about our date.’‘ Nearly two-thirds of the bloggers Viegas interviewed said that they rarely asked permission before using other people’s real names, though they apparently “became more sensitive to the importance of using pseudonyms after their friends and family objected.”
In the era of the persona-product that at once reaffirms the new ideal of the celebrity while challenging the faltering morality of community, it’s harder and harder to know where to draw the line. Emily Gould is the poster girl for this. A former Gawker editor whose series of blogs – anonymous and not – set off a tit-for-tat article/blog frenzy when a former boyfriend wrote about her writing about him on her blog in the New York Post’s Page Six Magazine. This prompted her to write about him writing about her in the New York Times Magazine. At this point, perhaps sensing how ridiculous and embarrassing all this must seem to the casual observor, Gould then ended the article by announcing that she has learned her lesson. Hence, she now finds herself “doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself.”
Of course, this has to be taken with a grain of salt since, obviously, by writing the article she is again revealing the personal details of her life, and promoting her blog (which is still going) and making money. Plus, as countless other blogs have pointed out (themselves only too happy to jump on the bandwagon and, like me, keep this story alive), Gould continues to blog on Gawker and elsewhere. All of which is to suggest a more complicated, less flattering truth about lessons learned in the age of the persona-blog-product: what Gould has learned isn’t that she needs to stop using her real life to make money and enhance her profile (even at the expense of others). What she’s learned is that she needs to carefully manage her revelations for maximum profit and exposure. Her cover story in the New York Times Magazine is a great example of her new, cannier, management style.
Finally, New York Observor Media Mob columnist Matt Haber notes in a column that Gawker, supposedly on the recieving end of Gould’s realization that gossip blogging isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, loved the entire ride. “Gawker’s first post officially linked to Ms. Gould’s Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments. A follow-up post c
locked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments. Sadly, another, about the article’s photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments. Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.”
2008,
14:13 GMT
Gawker Blogger Asks: Who Hired This PI to Investigate Me?
Posted by: Hal
Someone hired a Private Detective to investigate the Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan. In a hilarious reverse Peep move, he’s uploaded pictures and contact info for the two PIs who have been blundering around his hometown in Florida looking for dirt on him for unknown reasons. This is a great story that shows the potential we have to peep those who are peeping us. Blogs can be equalizers, but before we get all excited about the new age of people power, we also have to realize that unlike most of us, Nolan is a professional writer with a huge platform. He’s able to get even in ways most of us wouldn’t have available to us. Still it’s nice to know the potential is there. Some days, you just have to shout it out to the stars: Long live Peep!
This is one of the Private Dicks hired to investigate Hamilton Nolan.
2009,
14:14 GMT
Peep Art: Rhianna painting (with bruises)
Posted by: Hal
Since I’m on a celebrity kick here this week (see yesterday’s Courtney Love Double Peep) here’s today’s entry, Peep Art. Yes, peep is the new sex and as everyone knows peep (sex) sells. Enter Los Angeles artist Sham Ibrahim who has given us a Warhol knock-off portraying pop star Rhiannon’s police evidence photo (also conveniently leaked to the press). Taken after her boyfriend, fellow pop star Chris Brown, beat her up, the photo and subsequent painting show Rhiannon all bruised and bloodied.
But, hey, don’t look for social commentary here. Says the artist, who goes by his first name: “I thought the bruises in the police photo were interesting shapes to draw. And it was cool to color them pink and blue. Those are two of my favorite colors. There is no message to any of my art. It’s meant to look cool hanging on your wall and that’s it! I’m not into deep meanings.”
I’ll bet you aren’t. But you are into peep and you know, just like your not-buddy Courtney Love (see below) that anything that has to do with the private lives of celebrities will get you instant attention. In this case, when Sham’s painting was put up on celebrity gossip and ephemera site World of Wonder (you can buy it here for $100 and hang a faux Warhol beaten pop star in your living room) it was noticed by E!Online, then Yahoo News, and then thankfully made it into my daily Globe and Mail. The result: crappy Peep Art goes global!
I googled our man Sham and discovered that – exciting — there’s a Courtney Love connection to all this! In 2007, Sham wrote a piteous blog post on World of Wonder. In it, he follows Courtney Love around after one of her concerts and is apparently shattered when Courtney rejects him: “I jumped out of the cab and said, ‘Hey, Courtney!’ I was about to tell her that her show rocked and ask for one simple picture. That’ s it. Before I could do that, she said, ‘Why is this ugly guy following me?’ and sauntered into the hotel.”
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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