The Peep Diaries

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.”

I love it when so-called respectable newspapers run stories that are little more than celebrity gossip repeated under the guise of critique. It’s like, oh my god, I can’t believe those horrid tabloids…we’re so above this…it’s terrible..blah blah blah.

The piece that set me off was in last Thursday’s Globe and Mail, check it out here. In it Siri Agrell lists a bunch of celeb peep gossip about Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus and others then asks, all pretend worked up, “But since when has it become acceptable to obsess over the sex lives of teenagers?” Wow, like, how about ever since mainstream newspapers starting replacing serious articles on the arts with wire stories about the troubles and tribulations of celebrities?

An article in the newly released edition of the Ryerson Review of Journalism notes that in 2002 there were no celebrity stories in the Globe and Mail Weekend Review section. In 2007 the number averaged 2.75, ah, hell, let’s call it 3. Throw in stories like the kind the Globe published on Thursday (which could run in Life or Style or even Focus) and I’m sure we can get that number higher.

I shouldn’t pick on the Globe. I read a very similar story not that long ago that ran in the Toronto Star, pulled off the wire services and originally written for the LA Times. The headline was “Tabloids and bloggers target celebrities’ children.” No! Not the children! Once again, it managed to list all kinds of peep gossip under the guise of being indignant.

So if you’re worried that your celeb content is a little lite but you don’t want to seem light weight, go for the indignant angle, splash a big a pic of a hot celeb immersed in scandal and you’ve got the best of both worlds!

By the way, I can do this too! Here’s a pic of a celebrity and her kid that I came upon while entering celebrity kids in google trying to remember where I first read that article about bloggers targeting celebrity children. Actually I have no idea who this woman is but then I’m not the overseer of the Celebrity Baby blog, am I? Anyway, the blogger provides a caption that tells us this is a pic of “actress Jennie Garth, 35, and her middle daughter Lola Ray, 5” and she’s portrayed here “leaving a Target store in Los Angeles, CA on Monday, March 3rd. Dad is actor Peter Facinelli.” You got all that? Are you filled with revulsion for our society while also kinda curious about who this person is and why we’re looking at her? Hey, let me know what you find out.

Okay, so overall the whole 'first mean comment' controversy was good for the stats. Between March 18 and April 17th I had 547 visitors who looked at an average of 2 pages each. Our web consultant Andreas parsed the numbers and informed me that although absolute hits went up and stayed up, new visitors declined. In other words, I'm developing a regular readership but the 'controversy' failed to bring in new eyeballs.

Anyway, it generated discussion and debate, which was fun to be part of and is hopefully a sign of things to come. (See the debate between Janine and Mark M.) Looking back over those comments I realized that somewhere in the midst of this whole discussion I picked up a real 'mean' comment : "No offence, but you are a boring man. Do you have nothing better to do than writing a lot of BS? Go get a job." The comment was by "anonymous". Anonymous obviously has no idea what a great blog is all about. Get stuffed, buddy! Ah..that felt good. Seriously, though, the comment doesn't bother me in the least. Anonymous is irrelevant. If you aren't willing to put your name to your opinion then what you say won't ever matter. Anonymous is probably my brother.

Okay the very fact that I just felt the need to upbraid Anonymous suggests that maybe his comment does bother me. Is it true? Am I boring? Whatever dude. Seriously. Get a job.

So here’s an interesting little tale. This guy Andrew Baron sold his Twitter account on Ebay a few days ago. I don’t know how much he got for it but a blog that reports on Twitter doings reported that at one point the bid was up to $1,125.00 USD. As Andrew Baron had 1,636 followers, the blog notes that each of his followers are worth 0.69 USD at the very least.

So I guess the question is: how much is a good account worth? I’ve got 500 Facebook friends, should I cash in? Deal or no deal? It’s sort of like buying a World of Warcraft character that’s already been built up to have tons of extra powers. Something like that. Anyway, from a peep perspective many interesting questions are raised, mostly around how much dedicated followers with a demonstrated ongoing interest in peeping your life are worth.

For the record, here’s what Andrew put up on Ebay about selling his account: “It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations. In terms of monetary value, I have no expectations or needs at all so I decided not to put a minimum bid on this. Whatever will be, will be.”

“What exactly are you attempting to achieve here, Hal?” writes Mark McCawley. “Where’s the personal risk? Or is this going to become another very large coffee table book?”

Okay so that’s not exactly scathing but it’s mean, at least. It’s my first mean comment! It’s a dig at my writing career (though a strange one, since the only book I’ve published that could be remotely construed as a coffee book was the Original Canadian City Dweller’s Almanac – available on Amazon.ca starting used at .25 cents) and a dig at my blog. All neatly done in three concise sentences.

Well, look, he’s got a point. So far, not much risk happening on this blog. I’m not exactly opening myself up to you, my readership. I want to get more personal, but every time I try I cringe inside and pull back. But this blog is just beginning. There’s plenty of time for me to work up to it and spill my guts. I will reveal! Just give me time.

Anyway, according to Andreas who presides over all things peephal.com my stats are slowly growing. His last report said that I’ve got about 30 more daily visitors than I did last time he checked. But in total only 12 people have visited the site 15-25 times. He figures that I’ve got roughly 9 regular readers. Welcome back once more my loyal 9! If I’ve disappointed you, I apologize. But I’m doing my best here.

So I was going to write about my weekend but, honestly, not much happened. My hockey team was in the finals for our division but we lost. It was a fun game. That’s about it. Next week my parents are coming in for Passover. That should provide more fodder, I’m sure.

In the meantime, I did a CBC interview today that will air Wed. morning between 10 and 11am on CBC Radio 1’s Sounds Like Canada. I’m discussing the extremely important topic of “my favourite pop culture saying from when I was a kid” or something like that. My choice was Mr. T’s: “I Pity the Fool”. If you want to hear me waxing nostalgic over the A Team, be sure and tune in. I actually thought I sounded like a bit of a doofus, despite my genuine love for ‘T’. Still I managed to work in my 2nd favourite Mr. T tagline – “I ain’t gettin’ on no plane, Hannibal” while I was at it. Truth is I always leave radio interviews feeling like I was terrible. Especially when I’m trying to be funny. Well, listen in and let me know what you think. Be mean if necessary.

So on Friday’s post I promised that every other post would be about my life so that the blog would have a better balance between the more diarist stuff and links, thoughts, ideas and ruminations about the rise of peep culture. Then I promptly broke that promise by posting about US domestic surveillance centers and a link to piece by a columnist who was briefly a cam-sex worker. In my defence, I had forgotten that I had set up a few posts to happen over the weekend automatically. Then yesterday I was too lazy to blog. Actually I was slightly hung over from drinking beer with my hockey team (we won and are going to the finals this weekend) and wanted to finish putting a bunch of research into my peep culture database so I could finally get back to writing etc. etc. basically I was putting it off.

But no longer. First off, an update about lost shoes. Faithful readers may recall that in the last blog post that had anything like personal commentary, I wrote about getting in trouble with W. for losing E.‘s shoes. Well, I never found them. I called the community centre where I left them (after changing her into her boots) and they said they’d look but they never called back. So high up on the agenda upon arrival in Florida was new shoe acquisition. Luckily we found an outlet mall pretty quickly (wow, what a shock) and amazingly we found a pair of lavender New Balance running shoes to fit E.‘s tiny feet. They were probably half the price of what we would pay in Toronto, and we bought them and the same shoes one size up for when she grew out of them. E., meanwhile, was having a great time tearing adult high heeled shoes off the racks and shoving her feet into them and then tottering around. Finally, we made it to cash. Happy times for Hal as W. was so pleased with our acquisition that she forgot that I was the one who lost the shoes in the first place and so pulled out her credit card and paid! My inner cheap skate grinned and we all piled back into our rented Chevy Malibu and headed back home.

“Home” was the tiny island of Goodland, a short drive from Marco Island and about 45 minutes from Naples in southwest Florida. We rented a place there that had a tiny swimming pool E. refused to go in. It overlooked a bay filled with jumping fish and pelicans. It wasn’t far from the beach, which pleased W. and E. but it was also pretty near the Everglades and other nature areas, which pleased me. Goodland features about 10 roads, 3 different bar/restaurants, a trailer park, a seafood outlet that sells great key lime pie and friendly residents who like to troll back and forth to the bars on golf carts.

Here’s a pic of E. touching a snake at the makeshift zoo off the highway on the way to Everglades City that I’m pretty fond of.

The zoo was called the Skunk Ape Headquarters, the Skunk Ape being the Sasquatch or Yeti of the Everglades.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m awfully fond of cryptozoology in general and the search for Sasquatch in particular. Anyway, we stopped at the zoo on the way for an airboat ride, which I thought would be a nice way to see the Everglades mangrove swamps but which turned out to be a super loud super fast hurtle down narrow channels crowded with weeds and roots. W. held on to E. for dear life.

When we stopped halfway through we took the ear muffling headphones off E., she shook herself out of a shocked stupor, looked around and said, “I all done.”

So am I, for now.

Okay so there's lots going on in peep-land but first an announcement. As of Monday, this blog is going to get personal. Anyone who's been reading these posts knows that I've mostly been concentrating on outside links, interviews, research and other aspects of the peep phenomenon. But part of the point of this blog is to see what it's like to peep my own life. I haven't really done that yet. I haven't even managed to post promised pics from our Florida trip and an update about E's lost shoes. So no more! It's time to get personal. I'm clearly going to have to force myself to blog about my day to day life, so here's my plan: every second post has to be about my quotidian existence. I'm making a rule and sticking to it.

So what inspired this momentous decision? Well I did an interview yesterday with a young woman named Emmalene who hails from Hamilton, Ontario. She's a video blogger on YouTube (a status I'm hoping to work up to). Anyway, she's a funny eccentric who doesn't seem at all phased by negative comments, giving her opinion on evolution vs. intelligent design ("that's just my opinion...I'm not not sure what to think"), or posting videos of her singing songs that she barely knows the words to.

She talked to me about lonelines and community and how YouTube has become a major element in her life. And I realized talking to her that I'll never understand what it's like to have total strangers cheering you or telling you how much you suck until I actually give people a reason to make an emotional connection with me by sharing more of my life. So that's the plan. But not today. Not yet. Next post for sure. Probably Monday.

Not really. In fact Padme, the primary author of the blog Journey to the Darkside is sweet as can be. Even over the phone with her I thought she was going to offer me milk and cookies. And blog posts with titles like Victoria Anniversary Night and Happy 7th Birthday Skywalker! don’t exactly come across as dangerous.

But innocuous fare about trips and birthday parties quickly gives way to posts like “The First Time I Sucked Two Cocks in One Night” and “Darth Vader is My Daddy”. What gives? I ended up on the phone with the very kind Padme (not, obviously, her real name) and found out the following:

Padme’s husband is also her master. He makes all the decisions and regularly spanks or whips her with a riding crop. This is part of Padme’s life and she blogs about it almost as matter of factly as she blogs about recovering from surgery and celebrating her wedding anniversary. One suspects, though, that it is the details of her sex life that have caused the site to get over a million-and-a-half visits since its inception three years ago.

Part of Padme wants to get exposed. In her emails to me she refers to the blog as private even though she knows as well as I do that the blog is a public document open to all. When I ask her about this she says: “It’s a public blog and there’s always a risk with that. I have heard stories of other bloggers being found out by their families, but we’ve been pretty lucky, so far no one has come across it. I’ve been kind of worried from the beginning about that. You almost half expect that someone will come up to you and say ‘I know who you are.’ “

Well Padme doesn’t just half expect it, I get the feeling she half wants it to happen. After all, this blog is very detailed and anyone who knows this couple even casually would probably be able to put two and two together.

So why take the risk? It’s pretty clear that Padme has come to rely heavily on the blog as a source of community, friendship, creativity and attention. As she tells me: “I don’t drive, I don’t work, I’m a stay-at-home mom and I’m alone all day. It’s been a great way to connect to people.”

Somehow, Padme is able to ignore the fact that she knows very little about the 3000 people a day who read her blog. She talks to me about overcoming embarrassment and writing as if it was just Master who would be reading. When I ask her if she thinks it’s odd that thousands of strangers know more about her life than neighbours, friends and family she seems momentarily flustered. Finally she tells me that, at the end of the day, the pros outweigh the cons and she simply “tries not to think about the lurkers.”

Okay, so I just fell into a major hole and spent a couple of hours viewing videos on Justin.tv. I was looking for interesting clips to potentially use in the peep documentary and interesting people to interview. But I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with what I saw. The original concept was that people were supposed to have their own channels for lifecasting - you could get the apparatus from Justin and his crew and go out there and broadcast your life for all to see. We would see what you saw from your perspective. But it's become something more of a video blogging site, a cross between a Facebook and a youtube. The camera is mostly static and pointing at the person as opposed to pointing outward at what the person is looking at.

I'm sure that others have noted this better and much earlier than me. But hey, too be honest I don't really care what business model Justin follows. I was disappointed because there wasn't a lot of material on there that was of use to me. Mostly it was people being silly in front of their webcams. Some of it was live but most of it was "highlights" like someone burping loudly. The two clips I liked best were both ones in which young women were having somewhat confrontational phone conversations with males.

This one here features one of the better known lifecasters, Sarah Meyers, arguing with a stalker. This one shows a young woman arguing with a soon to be former boyfriend. Both are kind of entertaining in that weird, creepy, why-am-watching-this way, the boyfriend break up one probably more so than the Sarah Meyers stalker one.

I'm tired, it's the end of the day and I don't really have any great pronouncement on any of this right now except that I was disappointed by Justin.tv. Furthermore, 956 people watched a girl fight with her boyfriend and I am one of them.

Article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail today on a blogger and BBC columnist who chronicled their own demises from illness. “Blogging the process of dying is becoming a small yet poignant fixture on the Internet landscape.” The piece doesn’t give us any sense of why people might want to blog or otherwise make public their deaths, which is too bad.

But peeping death (our own and others) is an interesting piece in the peep puzzle. If we peep ourselves and others in order to be less alone, then it makes sense: what could be lonelier than death?

Of course peep culture has always had an interest in death: the 1978 Faces of Death cult film/montage of death scenes of humans and animals (some real but most fake) has spawned something like six official spin-offs and any number of unofficial imitators.

On the artistic side, there are documentaries like Silverlake Life: the View from Here a video diary of the death by AIDS of Tom Joslin. Here’s a description of the final moments of Joslin’s life as depicted on the video and described by John McGrath in his book Loving Big Brother: “Massi [Joslin’s partner] focuses the camera on each of Joslin’s eyes in turn. One, the lid covered in lesions, is barely visible; the other is clear: ‘that eye he can see in the camera with’. Massi then asks Joslin how he feels and Joslin mutters in a breathy voice, barely intelligible, with Massi attempting to translate: ‘he feels pretty bad, but wants his friends to feel good.’ The video is showing a frame of Joslin’s face, it cuts suddenly to the face again, a slightly different angle. There is a howl then Massi’s voice: ‘This is the first of July and Tommy’s just died.’ Joslin’s clear eye still stares towards the camera.”

So I’m back from my Florida vacation. More on that when I get a chance to upload my pictures of gators and beaches and such. Soon, I promise. In the meantime, some bad news from Blog HQ. The first round of numbers are in and they aren’t all that good. Here are my stats:

67 Visits
148 Pageviews
2.21 Pages/Visit
53.73% Bounce Rate
00:02:08 Avg. Time on Site
71.64% % New Visits

Not only have a mere 67 people dropped by, but apparently my 10 days away killed the blog. Basically nobody came. Blog HQ has told me that if I ever want an audience for my blog I better either 1) learn to blog all the time no matter where I am or 2) store up blog posts that automatically publish while I’m away in order to create the illusion that I am always blogging all the time.

So there you go. Hopefully now that I am back and blogging everyday again you, my readers, will return and grow. And to Blog HQ I say this: I’ve learned my lesson. Silence is death. I won’t disappear again!

Also, in my defence, I haven’t really been doing much to promote the blog. It’s not even listed on my home site. I’m going to see what I can do to let more people know it’s out there. Suggestions are, of course, welcome.

So got the first stats report on the blog. 32 readers so far spending an average of 2 minutes and 30 seconds on the page. I’m flattered. I haven’t really put it out there yet, they only way anyone would know it existed is through my Facebook page so 32 is probably pretty good. It’s also interesting to see the amount of detail that you can get regarding the visitors to your page. I know what city you are from and how long you spend on the page and in some cases even where you work (someone, for instance, from the CBC was reading the page…I know who you are by the way!) So I can peep you peeping me. I’ll try and keep a running update on the whole stats thing as it develops. In the meantime, if you are a total stranger who just happens to like reading my blog, by all means please do get in touch and let us know how you came to the site.

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In other news tomorrow we leave for Florida for a week or so. I won’t be blogging from Florida, primarily because the place we’re staying has no internet access. Otherwise I would blog for sure. I’m not that big a fan of vacations. I like to work and I like to hike and canoe and get away from the world. But beach and sightseeing isn’t my thing. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that’s my preference. W loves the beach and so does our two year-old and all in all it’s pretty fun making sand castles and collecting shells with a two year-old. Still I’m looking forward to when E is older and we can take the adventure quotient up a notch.

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Trying to pack up to go always leads to fighting in my family. This morning in the midst of packing W discovered that I left E’s shoes at the community centre on Saturday. I got yelled at. I’m a bad boy. I would probably have gotten yelled at less if we weren’t going to Florida tomorrow but I think W sees it as my subtle way to sabotage the family holiday. Not true. I’m just forgetful…By the time I got back from dropping E off at daycare and W was heading out to work all was (somewhat) forgiven. Called the community centre to see if they had found the shoes and they said they would look and call me back. They haven’t called back yet, which doesn’t bode well. How long could it take to check and see if anyone turned in a pair of white and pink New Balance sneakers? E wore her brown shoes to daycare today instead.

So got my first comment on the blog a few days ago. Very exciting. It came from an editor I know, who noted that essentially what I was doing was blogging about blogging. He astutely called the whole project very “met a”. It’s true, of course, though I would argue that the bulk of bloggers and others in the “peep” culture such as reality tv participants are also motivated by and conforming to the rules and expectations of a peep world, just less obviously.

In Joshua Gamson’s book Freaks Talk Back about the workings of talk shows, a talk show producer notes that it isn’t necessary to encourage the guests to act a certain way for a certain show. They already know how they’re supposed to act and come into it fully prepared to act that way because they’ve seen the show and they know that’s what’s expected of them. I feel the same way. I’ve seen the show and I know what I’m supposed to do.

But so far I’ve had a hard time doing it. I happy to blog about abstract ideas and emerging peep trends but I’ve been more reticent about blogging about my everyday life and feelings – which is, of course, part of this project. Hopefully once I get used to being a regular blogger, that’ll change and stuff will just start spewing out of me. Gotta train myself to be more like the talk show participant who doesn’t think about the performance they’re going to put on, but just goes out there and does it.

So a long gap between my first post and the next two posts. That’s because the launch date for the blog got put off until Sally (director of the peep culture documentary) got back from Paris. You see, the doc people want to film the launch of the blog. So everyone’s coming over today to capture this exciting moment. I spent the morning cleaning my office. You can see the floor now. It’s nice. I’ll take a picture.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit anxious about the whole thing. I’ve never blogged or really had much about my personal life out there. As a writer I like to re-read and re-think everything I put out there. I’ll need to get over that. Plus, of course, the whole idea of developing an audience of people interested in peeping my life. I can honestly say that I have no idea what that will feel like. So we’ll see.