Is peep the biggest thing in politics? Apparently Republican nominee Sarah Palin is tops on Google searches. Her name is first, but after that people want pics and gossip and peep – they’re searching for stuff like “photos”, “pregnancy” and the always subtle “sarah palin nude.” For more on this see a Wired blog post on the subject plus a complicated graph demonstrating that Palin is now more popular as a Google search term than Britney, Paris Hilton and even Obama.


Peep is changing politics and we’ve seen over and over again — I’ve written several times about how scandal in the private lives of politicians becomes public entertainment. But the Palin story is particularly complicated. It encompasses not just her, but her family including her 17 year old pregnant daughter and her 18 year old fiancée. Do they deserve to be peeped? We deserve to know that a politician who preaches abstinence and opposes contraception has a pregnant teenage daughter. That’s the kind of irony that says something very real and very important about the consequences of a certain kind of social policy.


At the same time, as Globe TV critic John Doyle notes in his column on the subject, Palin’s story seems somehow more up-for-grabs because she is, purportedly, a “normal” person, the kind of person who is, as he writes, “straight out of Survivor, Big Brother, Wife Swap, Love Cruise, Temptation Island, Married by America and Are You Hot?”


In other words, she’s low brow, and low brow not only deserves, but seems to invite, peep.


i stole this nifty graphic from the wired blog post…