Peep Culture
Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries, lately spoke at the Winnipeg Writers' Festival about how we've moved from Pop culture to Peep culture. In other words, how society has gone from watching celebrities, artists and performers (with talent) to watching ourselves, our neighbors or total strangers (who usually lack talent) in search of entertainment, attention, or connection.
Peep culture contains reality Television, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, chatrooms, iPhones and the entire range of social media, GPS-enabled gadgets and other types of continuous surveillance technologies.
In this new era of Peep, privacy has come to be a commodity and persons are willing to trade the particulars of their private lives for community, money or possible fame.
Peeping into the "actual lives" of others, or digitally documenting our personal, is acclimatizing us to want, require and desire surveillance. In our continuous urge to answer "What are you undertaking now?" persons seeking for connection are often finding addiction. How quite a few hours a day are devoured by an incessant require to blog, tweet, or upload that video from your cell telephone?
And when does the desire to share develop into "oversharing" (i.e., divulging far too substantially private info)? I have no interest in watching a middle-aged housewife getting spanked by her "Master," hearing lonely teenagers sing in the bathroom, or seeing everyone drunk out-of-his-thoughts and behaving badly.
The good paradox of Peep is that the all-consuming want to connect usually disconnects us from genuine and meaningful interaction, from cultivating correct friendships and from nurturing our own humanity.
Is our virtual world extra significant than the genuine world?
In The Peep Diaries, Hal Niedzviecki recounts his own encounter with social networking, when he invited his 700 Facebook pals, 30 Twitter followers and readers of his blog, to a party at his neighborhood bar. Only a single individual showed up she stayed for an hour, and then left Hal drinking alone.
As Hal says, virtual friendship is friendship with low (or no) expectations. "It's a lot easier to take portion in community from in front of a screen. It's considerably harder to make an emotional connection and then live up to an additional person's expectations, hopes, and desires. Social media creates distance, even as they fill in the gaps."
As we eagerly monitor the rising numbers of our Facebook good friends, Twitter followers or LinkedIn connections, we will need to make the distinction between genuine and pseudo-connection, among virtual and actual networking. In your vast social network, how a number of of these good friends and followers will conduct organization with you, come to your Christmas party or bring you homemade soup when you're sick?
I will usually choose face-time to Facebook would much rather network over spilled martinis than the World wide web, and would by no means trade my Actual Life for a Second Life. (C'mon, how satisfying can sex with an avatar be?)
Technologies, which includes the components of Peep, provides precious strategies to talk to each other, promote home business and do great stuff - but people, let's preserve it True.
