The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors »

Hal Niedzviecki's writings on culture have appeared in newspapers and magazines across North America. He is the founder of Broken Pencil, a magazine covering zine culture and the indie arts. In addition to three novels and a story collection, Niedzviecki is the author of We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture.

One man's journey through a rapidly transforming culture of lying, spying, revealing, and confessing.

Publishers Weekly

Ubiquitous video technology and the Internet have ushered in a "peep culture" that makes us all either-or simultaneously-exhibitionists or voyeurs, according to this eye-opening study. In good participant-observer fashion, Niedzviecki (Hello, I'm Special) dives into our mania for observing and revealing pseudo-secret personal information: he starts a blog, applies to reality television shows, does video surveillance around his house and slips a GPS tracking device into his wife's car. He's content to merely interview, rather than join, the middle-aged couples who post their amateur porn online. He argues instead that peep culture reprises an ancient impulse to bond through the sharing of intimacies, but worries that our digital version of village gossip and primate grooming is a weak and fraudulent foundation for community (out of his 700-odd Facebook friends and blog readers, only one showed up for his offline party). Niedzviecki's smart mixture of reportage and reflection avoids alarmism and hype while capturing the strange power of our urge to see and be seen. (June)

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1 Introducing Peep Culture 1

2 Becoming a Peep (Product) Person 21

3 Faking the Real: Everyday Secrets and the Rise of Peep TV 75

4 Breaking the Seal: Gossip, Grooming and the (Secret) Allure of Peep 121

5 Watching the Detectives Watching the Neighbors in the Golden Age of Surveillance 153

6 Escape from the Castle: Privacy in the Age of Peep 209

7 Future Peep: Why No One Came to My Party and Other Semi-Transparent Conclusions 259