The Peep Diaries

Great piece in the Washington Post today about a pilot project that looks at how installing webcams in the cars of teenage drivers might reduce accidents and unsafe behaviour. Of course, what's fascinating is what else it might do -- condition young people to accept that they should be watched all the time every time lest they hurt themselves or someone else.

Over the weekend the Globe and Mail ran a particularly weak piece about social networking and privacy. The article basically consists of the author confronting teens he finds on MySpace or Facebook with how much he now knows about them.

"During a two month-long investigation, The Globe and Mail tracked more than a dozen Canadians through their open social networking profiles, and used freely available web tools to build detailed profiles of each individual user...For example, there's the 23-year-old Oakville woman who posted her home phone number on an open Facebook profile. Plug the number into Canada411.com for a reverse address search, and you'll find her home address, which you can then search on Google Maps and see she lives on a quiet suburban street near the Queen Elizabeth Way. More personal, she's "addicted" to the MTV show The Hills loves Dr. Pepper and sometimes wears contact lenses...A Toronto teen posts comments about her favourite sexual positions; a 24-year-old Saskatchewan man posts details for a huge house party he plans to hold while his parents are out of town; an 18 year old Scarborough woman lists the address to her family's apartment."

The young people in question then say, "oh my gawd, I'm such a fool, I'll never do it again." Nobody asks the teenagers why they put so much information online, how they use these sites, or otherwise tries to understand what's so gripping about social networking.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the general tone taken when it comes to online privacy. It's always a given that what the teenagers are doing is bad, and that their use of social networking needs to be scared out of them. The whole ridiculous fear mongering reached its nadir at a Wyoming high school when a police officer showed a powerpoint presentation of MySpace pages and singled out girls in the class and their pages as particularly slutty. The police officer then went on to apparently say that he had shown some of the profiles to a sexual predator in prison who was, needless to say, very interested. As a final act, the police officer then noted that the page of a particular girl he'd already singled out contained her cell number. With her cell displayed via power point he pulled out his own phone and called her. Nice touch officer! The girl eventually left the assembly in tears and the whole incident is "under review".

But what's really revealed here is the extent to which people fear technology and want to suggest that it's just the latest teen craze rather than an entire systemic shift to living our lives online. Our lives are being changed by these technologies and blaming kids isn't going to change that.

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…