hal tweets ·7:42 AM
A short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why Peep culture trumps privacy online. http://bit.ly/bQECsC
Privacy
2008,
17:03 GMT
On the Train to Kingston
Posted by: Hal
We’ve just passed Belleville, Ontario and I’m listening to the woman one row up shuffle through papers and talk loudly on her cell about how she needs help figuring out how to reboot her suddenly inoperative Blackberry. I don’t know who she’s talking to since it’s only 8:00 am. Anyway, it’s a fitting start to this blog. Am I peeping her or is she happily exposing herself to anyone who cares enough to listen? I’m not really peeping, because what else can I do but listen? On the other hand, I am doing more than listen – I’m paying attention and writing down what she’s saying.
This blog is about the rise of peep culture. Definition: a culture 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.
So a bit of a peep into my morning: The train left at 7 am. I woke up at 6:10, five minutes or so before my cab was supposed to show up. Actually I didn’t wake up, W woke me up. Who knows when I would have gotten up if left to my own devices. I was counting on the kid to wake us both up at 6 am exactly, like she does every morning. Today, the little bugger decided to sleep in. So much to W’s annoyance I ended up waking them both up as I fumbled for something to wear and stumbled into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
Anyway, I grabbed my carefully packed bag, kissed everyone goodbye and jumped into the waiting cab. Five minutes later I realized I had forgotten my laptop, so we turned around. I ran back into the house past W and kid, and bounded up the stairs. W, who is the kind of person who has to get everywhere at least an hour early, shook her head in horror as I waved yet another frantic goodbye.
At this time in the morning it takes less than 10 minute to get from my house to the train station so I got there with fifteen minutes to spare – time to hit the bank machine and grab a coffee before the train pulled out. Stepping onto the train a few minutes before it left the station reminded me how annoying flying is and how great train travel is. High speed rail please!
I haven’t told you why I’m going to Kingston yet: On Monday, while compiling peep related links for this blog I dropped in on a site I’d been meaning to visit but hadn’t gotten around to yet. It was the website of the Surveillance Project , founded by sociologist David Lyon and located at Queen’s University in Kingston. I noticed that they had a talk scheduled on Thursday. A criminology prof from University of Montreal was coming to talk about public perception of CCTV surveillance cameras. Perfect material for an article I’m writing for The Walrus magazine and for the peep culture book I’m researching. So I called them up and asked if I could come visit the Surveillance Project and talk to David Lyon and the University of Montreal Prof. They set me up with 3 interviews – Lyon, the Prof and a grad student doing research on Facebook. That plus the talk seemed to make it more than worthwhile to spend a day in Kingston. I’ll be arriving in about ten minutes, so we’ll soon see if I’m right. (By the way, 2 more audible cell phone conversations took place on the train while I wrote this: One woman trying to coordinate a meeting and one woman just chatting about her life.)
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,
0:44 GMT
Max Mosley and UK's anti-Peep law
Posted by: Hal
It’s anti-Peep, not pro-privacy. That’s my take on the news that Max Mosley, Formula One boss who sued the Daily News after they paid a prostitute to hide a camera in her bra while she took part in his bondage and domination orgy, has won a judgment in the case.
Why do I say anti-Peep? Because what the judge essentially says in the ruling is that, to quote the New York Times, “the ‘unconventional’ behavior that tabloid journalists in Britain have regularly chronicled among certain celebrities — adultery, for example, or visiting a prostitute — would have to involve, in the future, some element of criminality, or activity conflicting starkly with the public image fostered by the individuals involved.”
In other words, you can Peep, but only in the public interest. This isn’t a resounding defence of the right to privacy, it’s a reigning in and defining of the right to Peep. The two are not the same thing. One says, paying someone to sneak a camera into a private orgy that breaks no laws is okay so long as you find out, for instance, that it’s a NAZI-themed orgy, which is, presumably news because Mosely is the son of famously fascist parents and a major public figure. But if he’s just doing a regular old spanking orgy, well, then, the public doesn’t need to know about that. So in that case, you should just forget all about the camera you snuck into the orgy. It’s not that you shouldn’t have snuck in the camera, it’s that having failed to record sufficiently smutty and shocking material, you should have deleted the pictures and forgotten all about it.
A strange, twisted bit of law making that says more about the age of Peep culture than it does privacy.
Mosley after court, surrounded by reporters.
The original Daily News front page.
2008,
13:10 GMT
Back Alley PeepCam: "Tuesday Morning Rain" comes with Great Peep Story
Posted by: Hal
A great comment by reader Mark McCawley of Edmonton. I’m reposting here so that more people can enjoy this fabulous Peep story. Perfect thing to accompany today’s pic of my back alley in the rain, courtesy Hal’s back alley PeepCam.
Mark Writes: “Funny thing happened a few nights back while I was reading an anthology I am to review. It was a little after 2AM and while taking a break sipping my coffee and gazing out my fourth floor flat’s 10 foot by 5 foot window which overlooks a deserted downtown Edmonton parking lot, what do I witness? A sports car enters the parking lot, and parks in the middle of the lot under one of the streetlamps. Out of the sports car emerge a man and a woman: the man in a black tuxedo, the woman in what I could make out was a purple satin dress; they had obviously just come from some high brow affair. In the man’s right hand: a camera attached to a very large lens. Next thing I know, the woman crawls up onto the hood of the sports car, yanks up her purple satin dress, her legs spread eagled for her male companion to photograph. This all took place in the span of about 40 to 45 seconds. Voyeurism? Exhibitionism? The point? Even in an empty downtown parking lot at 2AM, somebody is watching.”
Back Alley September 30th: Tuesday Morning Rain
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.
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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