The Peep Diaries

Okay, so here’s my report on dinner with Igor, purveyor of the RedClouds and VoyeurWeb amateur sex exhibitionist websites. The dinner happened in Toronto last weekend. Igor invited five couples – one from Toronto, one from Buffalo, two from Michigan and one from Windsor. Some of the couples posed mainly for the soft porn VoyeurWeb, but the couples from Michigan were into the more explicit and hardcore action on RedClouds. Those are the wild ones, Igor told me in his impish German accent. We had a semi-private room in an Italian restaurant which, as it turns out, was a good thing.

First off we had drinks and got to know each other. The couples were all older than me. I was probably the youngest person in the room, everyone else was in their Fifties. They were suburban empty-nesters with time to kill. They all had decent jobs and most of them had adult or near adult age kids. None of them were ‘out’ about their hobby to their families and friends and communities.

We sat at a single long table. I sat near the Michigan couples (best friends since they met each other online) and next to the Windsor couple. Igor – who has the air and appearance of an amateur sex Alfred E. Neuman – held court down at the other end of the table. The mood was jovial. We talked about how often the women are recognized going about their daily lives and what that feels like. Apparently, it happens occasionally, just enough to make it an event. It feels good, when it happens, though it can be a bit weird if the guy doing the recognizing gets a bit too excited. We talked about RedClouds parties at which the attendees wear different color wristbands so that the camera toting hordes know who they are allowed to photograph and post online and who doesn’t want to be publically identified.

Wine flowed freely and the jokes got increasingly ribald. At the same time, there was just a bit of awkwardness to the proceedings. The women on VoyeurWeb were quieter, insisting that they only posed because their husbands wanted them to. They wanted me to know that they did other things too – they golfed, worked, volunteered. Their men talked about camera lenses and photography courses. In contrast, The Michigan couples had pretty much engulfed themselves in the lifestyle. They no longer spent much time with their other friends. They traveled to parties and group holidays. It was clear that those who embraced the more social element had a totally different take on it than those who just privately snapped pictures and posted them. The posters were more into the voting and the comments. The socialites were more into the discussion boards and the gatherings.

Still, some commonalities: the women liked the attention and the men liked the adventure and sense of transgression. With the main courses cleared and new bottles of wine opened, body parts began to be flashed. The Windsor husband pretended to drop something under the table. He crawled around under there with his camera. When he emerged, the camera was passed around so we could see his up-skirt, no panties conquest. Everyone oohhed and ahhed about the picture. I looked over at the woman whose genitalia had just been photographed. She was, surprisingly, one of the more reserved VoyeurWeb posers. She was flushed, a little shocked at her behavior maybe. I wondered what was going on in her head. Everyone else kept looking at the picture, an object of fascination, a kind of totem around which to order their collective presence at the night’s festivities.

Tonight I’m having dinner with 15 or so amateur exhibitionists all of whom regularly post pictures of themselves naked and/or having sex on the websites Voyeurweb and RedClouds. [in case you haven’t figured it out yet, these are both explicit sex sites so be cool with that if you click on the links.] Voyeurweb is one of the longest running and probably the most visited amateur sex site online. Anyway Igor, the founder and owner of these sites, who I met up with last night, has organized a gathering in Toronto for my benefit. So I’m going to go meet everyone and, uh, see what happens….It’ll be really interesting to talk to the couple and get a better sense of not only why they chose to peep themselves in this way, but how they interact with each other — is a common interest in online nude exhibitionism enough to create friendship and community? More early next week!

So I’ve been fighting with my brother lately. He lives north of Toronto in suburban Vaughn. It’s about 40 minutes to get there from where I live, downtown, longer in rush hour. Our fight is mainly about the fact that he only wants me and my family to come to him. He hasn’t been down to our place in 8 months. Nice. How about you make the drive one of these days, big brother?

Anyway he had this barbecue on father’s day and I said we weren’t coming. 1) because he never comes to our place even when I go out of my way to invite him and try to make plans with him and 2) because these family barbecues are, ironically, a terrible way to actually hang out with my niece and 2 nephews — they are too busy playing with their cousins (my sister-in-law’s brothers and their wives have, like, 10 kids between them). If I’m going to drive 40 minutes each way with a screaming 2 year old in the backseat I want to at least be able to spend some time with brother’s kids. Plus all those screaming older kids carrying on freaks E. out so she gets scared and spends the whole time sitting in W.‘s lap looking worried.

All in all, very annoying and not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Right now, we’re at an impasse. We usually talk on the phone everyday – but that’s come to a standstill. Of course this happens every few months, the adult equivalent of when we were kids and we used to absolutely wail on each other with a real, heartfelt desire to do damage.

There’s nothing like fighting with your sibling. It’s pure hate and pure love all at the same time. Whatever we do and say, it’ll all blow over eventually. In the meantime, I’m gonna do the mature thing and lay down the gauntlet: I’m not going to his house until he comes to mine and that’s final and forever no matter what.

hey, just a heads up to let you know that the magazine I publish, Broken Pencil: the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts, is in the hunt for an assistant editor. Read the job description here.

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.”

We celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary on the weekend. We dropped off E. at her aunt’s and headed off to a fancy inn for the afternoon and night. We went for a stroll in the Forks of the Credit Provincial Park then checked in, napped, tried out the giant Jacuzzi tub the room came with, and otherwise relaxed.

It was a pretty great weekend for a number of reasons. Not only were we celebrating 10 years of marriage and our even longer relationship (W. and I have actually known each other for almost 20 years!), but this was our first real getaway on our own since E. was born, almost 3 years ago.

It’s not exactly a new idea, but, yes, it’s very very good to get away from the kid(s) and be on your own for a while, even if it’s just 24 hours.

We picked E. up around 4 or so the next day. She’d had a great time with her cousins, but was pretty exhausted. The next morning she hit the wall and put on a 2 hour temper tantrum that was pretty impressive. Possible that she was sending a message?

Hey kid, do your worst, it was well worth it.

An incredible amount has happened in our lives over the last 10 years. I’m actually kind of hoping that the next ten will be just a bit less eventful. Not boring. Just not involving almost every possible major life transition there is including marriage, pregnancy, starting careers, buying a house, etc. It’s amazing, really, when you think about how much two people go through together. Okay forget all that nonsense about wanting things less eventful. Bring on the next decade! 24 hours of rest and I’m ready for anything.

I've been back from the Kingston conference for a while but I've been neglecting my blogging pretty bad. The deeper I get into the writing of the book the harder it is to pull out of it and blog. I think for the next few months I'll only be doing a post a week or so while I wrestle with laying down the foundations of the book. That process, by the way, is going well. I've got about 150 pages strung together in a rough order. I've had a few moments where I've really felt what the book is going to be like, how it's going to work. That's all I'm really asking for at this point.

So at the Kingston conference I sat on a panel with a fellow from Canadian Heritage and a professor from Carleton University in Ottawa. The panel was called "Fostering Engagement Through Social Media." I talked about how skeptical I am about the web as a medium for social change, and how everything goes through the filter of 'you' as in - how will this social cause look on your profile etc. I noted that the vast majority of activity on the web in Canada is in the hands of US-based for-profit corporate interests and if community and activist groups want to engage in social networking, they have to be careful to not be doing the work for these entities.

Anyway, I got a bit more virulent than I meant to and afterwards the Professor on the panel accused me of being part of an overall social moral panic about new technologies. All due respect to her, my argument had nothing to do with morality at all. My concern was and still is that the more we engage with things like social media and the more we 'do' Peep Culture, the more we are being shaped by entities that are not necessarily under our control or in our best interests. Before we can talk about the positives of the web - which are many - we need to understand the framework that underlies it. I don't think she got what I was saying, but a lot of people in the room did seem to appreciate my point of view.

The part of the conference I attended was, overall, very vibrant and interesting. I met interesting people like Gavin Sheppard of the Remix Project and the gentlemen behind the Stolen from Africa project/movement. Also, my pal Rinaldo Walcott was doing the keynote speech, which was very good, so I got to hang out and drink wine with him.

When I got back from the conference there was a blog comment from the organizer of the conference, Professor Rachel Laforest, with some thoughts on what I'm trying to do with this blog and on connectivity via Peep. She asks: "Will this comment here that I’ve posted have an impact on our relationship? Is it the fact that we met briefly —- will you answer me, will we develop something after our initial contact? How can this tool sustain and foster stronger relationships between people?"

It's a good question, one that's difficult to ultimately know. If I hadn't met Rachel, she wouldn't have read my blog or commented and that would be that. Because I've met her, and because we have overlapping spheres of interest, we now have an on-the-ground relationship that can be fostered further by her reading the blog and commenting and so on and so on. So, yes, we'll have a "stronger relationship" as friends and colleagues because of the blog and what I tell about myself on the blog. There are probably people out there, friends of mine, who read the blog and know what I'm up to, even though they don't comment or call me up and say so. They don't have a blog so I can't return the favor.

At the same time, everyone I speak to who is an active 'doer' of Peep Culture is obsessed with numbers. They goal is to break out of your little circle of people you've actually met and form a much bigger 'community' made up of globally dispersed strangers who are ultimately more your fans than your friends. And that's why I talked about being wary at the conference. Because the ideology of fame has a way of creeping into these systems so kindly provided to us free of charge so we can 'connect'. Many, if not all, the people I've interviewed who are heavily into bogging, social networking, Second Life, lifecasting etc. cite the 'community' as one of their main reasons for doing what they do. People are paying attention to them and they are paying attention to others. Relationships are formed in this way, though at best these are, I would argue, quasi-communities or partial communities. They are communities of mutually assured recognition. And, as such, they only go so far.

In 1922 American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty would create the genre eventually to be known as documentary and eventually morph into Reality Television. His achievement was the world famous Nanook of the North , a documentary film shot in the Arctic and based on the life of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family. The film was a huge hit with audiences who bonded with Nanook and his seeming battle for “survival”. But some critics complained about the veracity of the film: when Nanook harpoons a seal and pulls it out of a hole in the sea ice it is obviously already well dead. Nanook and his family pretend to be tucked in for the night asleep in an igloo that is, in actuality, half of an over-sized igloo built so that Flaherty has enough room to film in and enough daylight to film by. In fact, throughout the film Nanook and clan mug for the camera and clearly enjoy the attention. In a way, that makes them America’s first Reality TV family — a family pretending to be who they are; a family recreating their everyday lives in order to provide entertainment for others.

Today the E! network in the US is launching Living Lohan . It’s the latest in a series of family based Reality TV shows in which famous parents ‘use’ their kids to enhance their own profile. The kids, of course, do not protest, usually because they too want to make money and be famous, but also, in some cases, because they have no clue what’s going on.

Living Lohan follows a typical pattern: mom Dina propels 14 year old Ali (younger sister of Lindsay, of course) on her supposedly inevitable path to stardom. Also in the mix is 11 year old Cody and grandma. Now, sure, the Osbornes and the Simmons parents used their children, but at least they’d hit puberty. These kids are too young and too stupid to have a clue what they are doing. And their mom is too obviously venal and self serving to even try and make the argument that she’s just following their lead. On one promo clip we see she calls a website and threatens to sue after seeing a blurry picture the site claims is of daughter Lindsay doing something with someone. But Lindsay isn’t part of the show, she never appears, is only mentioned over and over again, her aura of indisputable fame hanging over the entire proceedings. So what this really amounts to is simple: the mom trying to show how she’s protecting her children even while the famous one has already distanced herself from the project (and, presumably, her mother) and another (not famous) older brother isn’t in the mix or mentioned at all.

A few years after Nanook was an international hit and grossed millions, Nanook died of starvation on a hunting trip. His kids, presumably, went on to live the lives they were born into: there was no followup, no spin-off reality show, no record deal. Ali and Cody should be so lucky.

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Wow. Blogging from the airport. I'm a real blogger now! Updates to the blog have been slower the last couple of weeks, I admit. I've been working on the book and when I write I like to put everything else out of my mind as much as possible.

But until Monday book work is on hold as I'm off to Ottawa to sit on a Canada Council for the Arts jury and then on to Kingston to be part of a conference put on by the Queen's University School of Policy. The conference is called "Empowering the voice and engagement of citizens: Is the voluntary sector still a relevant player?" I'm on a panel discussion about fostering engagement through social media. I'm still tossing ideas around in my head about what I'm actually going to say. Does social media foster engagement or disengagement? I guess at the end of the day it depends who you are and how you use it. At the same there are always general trends that can be observed and these trends suggest that while social media offers many opportunities for self presentation and invention, this may well come at the expense of political and even cultural engagement.

At the same time, maybe groups can play off the idea of the personal being the political and things like Facebook being primarily extensions of our largely trivial social lives. I'm thinking of suggesting at the conference that organizations consider starting local groupings around a particular issue and that the group leaders could host a night at a house or local pub or whereever devoted to that issue. It's like the trend of bands playing at people's houses, a trend that only works because of social media and web communication/community. Why not do it for Greenpeace? Empower people to present the issue the way it is relevant to them and to get involved on their terms.

Anyway, those are some initial thoughts. The conference is on Saturday morning so if anyone wants to chime in before then with ideas and input, please do. I'll check in.

In my personal life, had fun with E. over the long weekend. She's really very funny. I always have to be "the mommy" (sometimes "the daddy") and she's always "baby" or "baby monkey" or "baby skunk ape" (see blog post on trip to Florida) or "baby guinea pig." Then we play which consists of me covering her up and her peeking her head out of the blankets and making the appropriate baby or baby animal noises. Yes, that's what counts for fun in Hal's universe right now.

W. called just as I was trying to pack up (last minute of course) and I was a bit snippy with her on the phone. I apologize! Does that count? Can one apologize via blog?

I came across the work of Cheryl Sourkes on the weekend. She’s a Toronto artist who grabs images from live streams of webcams and, as she writes, “reformats” them and “prepares them for life offstream.”

She’s currently exhibiting until the end of May at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, which has more images of her work online. The images that really interest me are the ones set in domestic situations, pictures like the ones below that evoke the lonely disconnect inherent to Peep Culture.

The images evoke the personal but also seem all too aware of the camera. They leave us perplexed, on edge, wondering why we’re watching and why nobody is watching us.

Below are three images from the exhibit for you to check out.