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The Peep Diaries

Shallow Hal

The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, by Hal Niedzviecki. City Lights Books, 2009.

In a world where the private becomes more and more public and everyone wants to know about everyone else, and wants everyone else to know about them, the Internet is king. Hal Niedzviecki delves into the world of social networking and digs to uncover why we put it all out there. We've become a mass of TMI—too much information—and we just can't get enough, an obsession Niedzviecki coins "oversharing."

Finding that we've become frantic to fill a void that is never satisfied, it's no surprise that the popularity of tweeting, blogging, posting and webcamming is snowballing in an unstoppable frenzy. The Peep Diaries is a crash course in the many ways our culture exposes itself and an investigative, often humorous look at just how attention-starved and lonely the majority of people are. Talking with many of the average Joes who expose themselves through tweets, blogs, posts and webcams, Niedzviecki shares their stories and tries to understand their motives. From employees fired for blogs they've written to middle-class housewives who post amateur soft-porn pics of themselves, to shaming your neighbor for stealing your Sunday paper by posting a video of it on YouTube, to self-created cyber-celebrities, the wired world has become part of our daily lives for better or worse. It's made use of our time more efficient, yet much more of our time is consumed as we stalk, spy, watch and peep at others through media that didn't exist until the last decade. And as the Peep Diaries discovers, the more we become connected by computers through our obsessions with "reality," the more disconnected we become from reality. For anyone interested in what the last two decades have found us immersed in, Niedzviecki's book is a must-read.—BA