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, 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.

Scanning my last bunch of blog posts you might think I have sex on my mind this month…And, truth be told, I did just have an interesting conversation with a swinger who likes to post pics of his wife having sex with other men online…But that’s another story. Right now, I just wanted to throw up a quick link to breaking news out of Detroit. Seems the mayor their has now been indicted for lying under oath about the affair he had with his now former chief of staff.

That’s the story for some but more interesting is the fact that the Detroit newspaper that broke the story got their hands on text messages between th mayor and his chief of staff dating back to 2002. Where did they get those messages from? The whole thing is unraveling a lot like the Spitzer thing did, with allegations that public money is being abused to pursue a private agenda. Then again, if it was public money being used to pursue an obsession with toy trains, we wouldn’t be seeing these headlines everywhere.

Peep culture strikes again, sex sells, and I can’t stop blogging about this stuff. Is there a relationship? Naaaaw….

Ellot Spitzer, now former Governor of New York, didn’t think anybody needed to know about his propensity for high priced call girls. He was wrong because 1) he was violating laws he’d sworn to uphold and 2) he was costing the taxpayers money while sating his desires.

The now sworn-in new Governor of New York, David A. Paterson, apparently feels like people do need to know about his extramarital affairs. On his first day of the job he held a news conference and announced that he’d had several affairs “including one”, as the New York Times reports, “with a state employee.”

The fact that Paterson felt compelled to get up in front of the world and, with his wife at his side, discuss the intimate details of their rocky relationship, indicates the extent to which a culture of Peep has taken hold of our society. Paterson had to get up there and peep himself because he was worrried, as he said at the news conference, that he would be “blackmailed” and that if the stories were to come out New Yorkers would lose faith in him.

But the real issue is that in the age of Peep media would be all over this “story”, eager to turn intimate into entertainment. As the New York Times reports: “Just after the swearing-in, while Mr. Paterson’s supporters were still celebrating, the new administration was plunged into its first crisis, as a Daily News columnist inquired about a past affair and Mr. Paterson and his mostly untested advisers debated how to handle the matter.” The Daily News wanting to know — and inevitably finding out — is what Paterson knew would happen if he didn’t circumvent the process by peeping himself. In this way, Paterson and his wife can control the flow of information and prevent people coming forward claiming to have been the new Governor’s one-time mistress or whatever. Naturally the couple declined to provide a laundry list of the people they’ve slept with and now the story is over. It would be difficult for even the most purient media outlet to justify further digging.

Spitzer can really only blame one person. But any reprecussions that come Governor Paterson’s way because of his remarkable news conference are not so much the result of his past actions but the result of a society that is all too ready to turn the need to know into the want to know.

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.