«IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL BE FAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES»

In his new book, "The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors," writer Hal Niedzviecki names this “cultural movement steeped in and made possible by technological change.” He calls it “peep culture.” Peep culture, according Niedzviecki, encompasses myriad cyber-phenomena: Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital movies of a fat kid pretending to be a Jedi Knight, cell phone photos — posted online — of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and citizen surveillance. Peep is the backbone of Web 2.0 and the engine of corporate and government data mining.Peep culture involves watching and being watched, snooping and spying, gawking and gossiping; it means exposing our intimacies with an eye toward bonding with others and growing comfortable with the increasingly common slippage between public and private. Peep culture, like pop culture, informs the atmosphere — it is the atmosphere — in which we live. Writes Niedzviecki, “It’s like that famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. And you do see it. All the time, everyday, everywhere.”

Salon
July 23 2009