The Peep Diaries

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.

Hey everyone, I’ve been neglecting the blog a bit, I know. But I’ve got a lot of stuff to put up here, so hopefully I can make up for it. I’ve been furiously writing and editing and thinking on matters Peep, which, at the end of a day that seems to end really quickly, leaves me with no energy to blog. But enough excuses. Here are some pics from my ongoing Back Alley Surveillance project. Someone upstream is washing their car. Oh the excitement!

It’s starting!

Here comes the foam!

Dude spares no soap!

Oh the humanity!

Things are getting back to normal. My allergies are killing me (ragweed) so I’m confined mostly to the indoors but I console myself by continuing to survey my back alley. Here are a couple of shots. Me and W. were both in my office last night with the camera feed on screen and she said, “Nothing every happens but I can’t stop looking at it.”

the entrancing alley at night

the allure of the alley by day