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.”

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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Okay I was the only guy not in a tie at the Walrus lunch fundraiser I participated in yesterday. I probably should have guessed, given that it was held at the tony old school University Club in downtown Toronto. Anyway, that wasn’t the only surprise the event held: it was sold out and packed with famous Canadians including Pamela Wallin, Valerie Pringle, and others. Plus it was being moderated by Carol Off from As It Happens and taped so that a short bit of the talk could be aired on her show. (Was it? Did anyone hear it?)

I felt a touch nervous as I waited for this shindig to get going. But it all went well. I started off reading a list of books that Amazon.com recently suggested I might want to buy including The Sexual Revolution 2.0: Getting Connected, Upgrading Your Sex Life, and Finding True Love — or at Least a Dinner Date — in the Internet Age; Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry; Start Your Own Adult Web Site Business; America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction. That set the tone and away we went. Science fiction writer Robert Sawyer was my foil (he launches a new book tomorrow) and the ensuing 40 minutes or so were a sprawling battle about the future of surveillance, privacy and transparency. Afterwards, Carol told us that we should take our show on the road, which I’m pretty sure was a compliment.

So that’s what I did yesterday. It’s been a frustrating week in terms of getting writing done. E. has been sick battling a flu cold so she’s been miserable. She’s only now recovering. I spent Monday with her, then spent all of Tuesday shooting a trailer for the peep movie, then half of wed. at a Broken Pencil meeting. Then yesterday the Walrus debate. Today I’m catching up on blogging, emails and general organization. Next week, I’m writing. Nothing but writing. And blogging. Of course blogging.

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, this is one of the weirder ones: Max Mosley, head of Grand Prix and son of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascist party in the 1930s, gets caught having a sadomasochistic orgy involving NAZI regalia. Apparently, he was set up. Writes the New York Times: “The Sunday Times of London reported in last weekend’s editions that Mosley was the target of a setup involving a van with a hidden video camera parked outside the Chelsea basement flat where the sex session took place, and that a miniature camera was concealed in one of the women’s bras.”

I mean it’s hard to have sympathy for this guy. Here’s a description of the video that the Sunday Times of London posted then later removed: “two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners’ uniforms. The video showed Mosley counting in German – ‘Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!’ – as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women. ‘She needs more of ze punishment!’ he cried in German-accented English.”

But who really needs more of the punishment here? The video proves Mosley has weird fantasies and the money to act them out. But as he quite rightly says to the press: “As it is, the scandal paper obtained by illegal means pictures of something I did in private, which, although unacceptable to some people, was harmless and completely legal.”

He’s got a point. Does the public have a right or need to know what this guy does with his spare time? Irrelevant question. Peep culture trumps privacy every time.

So yesterday was the first annual Family Day, a new rather lame “holiday” invented by the Ontario government. Daycares were closed so I was home with E. I guess that’s the point of family day but of course when you are freelance you don’t have anybody giving you paid days off. W went into the office for half the day. As I was busy keeping E entertained I started to think of how weird it is to have a holiday that utterly lacks any kind of tradition. So anyone got any ideas? I’m thinking deep fried raisins, a televised parade of crying toddlers, and a marathon of family friend video games that goes deep into the night and leaves all parental and kid units bleary-eyed and vaguely hostile for the rest of the week.

One more thing on family day: what about people with no family? won’t they feel bad sitting at home alone? Family Day, coming just a few days after Valentine’s Day, is a double whammy for those without any source of love in their lives. Will Ontario see a rise in suicides and help-line calls in the 3rd week of February? Help me, I’m at home eating my deep fried raisins and watching the toddlers on floats bawling their eyes out but I’ve got nobody to play Wii with and the only Valentine the mailman brought me was from McDonalds and I’m thinking of ending it all, damn you Dalton McGuinty! (premiere of Ontario, responsible for holiday…)

In order to celebrate family day after E went to bed we watched the first two episodes of the second season of Gene Simmons: Family Jewels. I was impressed with his star turn on celebrity Apprentice and wanted to see more of this aging pseudo-Lothario in action. Very disappointing. The whole thing just came off as Ozzy-lite. Everybody wanted to be wacky and histrionic but nobody seemed to have the chops to do it. Gene’s family lacks dysfunction in a big way. According to Gene’s website season 3 debuts in March. Maybe it gets better? Never mind. W is obsessed with that new HBO show In Treatment anyway. More on that later.

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.