Here is another article that purports to look at the impact of technology on our lives - both good and bad. The focus of the article is on Hal Niedzviecki and his book & documentary, Peep Culture, which observes that . . .
pop culture has morphed into peep culture, where voyeurism becomes an entertainment in which we watch ourselves or strangers in unscripted moments. Or days. Through this, he says, ordinary people become objects of entertainment, not of empathy.He goes further however . . .
In The Peep Diaries he describes how he tracked his wife’s progress to work on a Google map. She had a GPS in her purse. He saw how easily he became obsessed with his wife and child’s whereabouts, just because he had the technology that allowed him to follow them.So he reluctantly became the subject of his own reality show and documentary which aired on CBC back on February 16 (the show is called The Passionate Eye). If you live in Canada, you can watch the show online, if you are in the US, you're sol. For the rest of us, here is the trailer:
The article also looks at Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, a new book that explores the intrusion of the digital world into modern life.
You can read more from Niedzviecki's perspective in this "first person" article from the National Post.
Are we hard-wired to continuously connect?
Leslie Scrivener, Feature Writer
Published On Sun Jan 30 2011“It’s an old, outmoded concept to say we’re only friends if we spend time together in real life.”
— Adam, in the documentary Peep Culture
Hal Niedzviecki reflects on who he is, acerbic but loving, a loner with a handful of friends, a wife and a child. A writer — nine books — he works from home in his basement office. He’s active on the Internet but has no cellphone; he’s says he likes to be alone with his thoughts when he walks.
The 40-year-old is content not to be connected, but curious about how technology changes the way people — the Tweeters, texters, bloggers, peepers, Facebook posters and reality show wannabes — relate to one another.
Not really the kind of man who would want to be on a reality show, you’d think. But there he is, in a documentary film looking hopeful, keen even, at a reality TV casting call.
“Interesting look, the glasses, the hair — but not hot,” says one casting agent viewing Niedzviecki’s audition video.
“Schlubby look,” says another.
“All talk and no action,” says the first.
Why expose oneself to this embarrassment?
In 2009 Niedzviecki wrote a book called The Peep Diaries, in which he argues that pop culture has morphed into peep culture, where voyeurism becomes an entertainment in which we watch ourselves or strangers in unscripted moments. Or days. Through this, he says, ordinary people become objects of entertainment, not of empathy. Researching the book, he discovered how hard it is to resist snooping around in other people’s lives.
RELATED: Is the Internet detrimental to human relationships?
In The Peep Diaries he describes how he tracked his wife’s progress to work on a Google map. She had a GPS in her purse. He saw how easily he became obsessed with his wife and child’s whereabouts, just because he had the technology that allowed him to follow them.
It was similar, though less compelling, watching what was going on in his back alley, where he’d installed a surveillance camera. His wife, Rachel Greenbaum, got the bug too, saying, “Nothing ever happens, but I can’t stop looking at it.”
Pursuing this theme, he became the subject and narrator of a documentary film called Peep Culture, for which he reluctantly — he is a private person — installed web cameras in his west Toronto semi for nearly two months, starring in his own on-line reality show. How would he respond to being followed, to having fans who could comment, uncensored, on his quiet life, which is often dull? After all, he is a writer, not a lion tamer.
The film, to be broadcast Feb. 16 on CBC’s The Passionate Eye, coincides with the publication of a new book by Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist and ethnographer Sherry Turkle. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, explores the intrusion of the digital world into modern life.
Turkle pares down the hope and optimism she had in the mid ’80s about the Internet and other technologies. Now it’s time for a correction, she says, since we’ve come to use technology as a substitute for face-to-face connections, and to create “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”
Niedzviecki was surprised to see how quickly he yearned for this “illusion of companionship.” He wanted fans, and he wanted them to watch him.
“I began to be very interested in who was watching me and what they had to say. I began to have this nagging sense if I wasn’t on line, sharing some aspect of my life in as dramatic as possible a form, I was wasting my time.”
Then he began altering his behaviour to make the watching more interesting, once even putting a pot on his head and dancing around his kitchen for no reason other than a fan urged him to do it. “Even though I knew what I was doing, I couldn’t stop myself. It is a really powerful addiction and it taps into this human need for connectivity that modern society has made very difficult.
“That was the insidious, really scary aspect of it — someone like me with a lot of resistance gets sucked into.”
Niedzviecki (whose parents called him Hal after his great-grandfather and the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey) does get out of the house — to the reality TV casting call, to a lonely man in San Francisco who finds community in the people who follow him on his home webcam as he vacuums or endures insomnia, and to Vancouver, where he meets a group of 20-ish hipsters who have no reservations about making their private lives public.
There’s Adam, who works in IT and records lists of every aspect of his life — from buying a hot dog to sex acts, given and received — on a website. Anyone can read them.
The film’s director, Sally Blake, says for high users such as Adam there’s no line between physical and online reality.
“He really scoffs at people who use the word ‘real’ life,” she says. “That’s so 1995. It’s such an outmoded way to think of your real life and online life. It’s so integrated. He knows so many people because he met them on the Internet. It’s so natural. It’s kind of fourth dimension.”
Since Adam — who was Tweeting constantly throughout the filming, “without thought” — volunteers so much about his life, it doesn’t bother him that strangers know a lot about him, Blake says. “He wasn’t defensive about privacy.I felt the whole paradigm of privacy has shifted. He was getting more out of participating in these networks than not . . . He doesn’t really have a choice. If you don’t participate, you don’t actually have a social life.”
This blurring of real and digital friendship is worrisome to psychologist Turkle. “Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters?” she asks.
American teens from 13 to 17 now text about 120 messages every day, according to a Nielsen report released this month. And this at a time when, as Turkle observes, teens should be developing not only their identity but also empathetic skills. They need stillness, they need down time, they need to have secrets, she writes, and they need to separate. And yet she says, they are constantly “tethered . . .
“The text driven world of rapid response does not make self-reflection impossible but does little to cultivate it.”
But it’s not only a generational compulsion. Who hasn’t been annoyed by a friend’s attention to his cellphone rather than the conversation he’s meant to be part of?
Turkle attends a funeral and to her dismay sees mourners around her texting during the service. “I couldn’t stand to sit that long without getting on my phone,” one of the texters, a woman in her 60s, explained.
Some find constant connection a tyranny and admit the triteness of much that’s said. In an extreme example of text overload, a 16-year-old interviewed by Turkle politely turned off his cellphone while they were speaking, then found he had 100 texts when he turned it back on an hour later. As he walks away, he murmurs to himself, “How long do I have to continue doing this?”
Maddy Hope-Fraser, a 19-year-old fine arts student from Toronto, recalled for the Star the freedom she experienced last summer when her phone was broken. “I felt sort of released,” she says. “I didn’t have the responsibility to be in touch and always texting to show I was still their friend. When I went back to school I had to get a cellphone and I was dreading it.”
There are practical reasons for texting — it’s free, and young people also say it poses less risk. “You can feel more comfortable texting someone you’re less close with,” says Elizabeth May, a 21-year-old MBA student who has studied social media. “Talking on the phone is a much more personal interaction.”
Sonia Wong, a fourth-year Montreal economics student, knows the strategies behind texting. “In the first stage of dating, in terms of ‘the game,’ texting works better than meeting the person. It reinforces that distance, builds a mystique or wall.”
Yet many people, especially the young, use texting and social media to stay constantly connected. “That’s what all our friends are doing,” Hope-Fraser says. “That’s where the updates are, because all our friends are in the loop and you want to be in the loop and not missing out things. There’s a bit of addiction. You open your computer and the first thing you do is check Facebook. I realize I don’t need to.”
The banalities of the postings surprise even the posters. “It’s where I put instantaneous ideas,” says May. “This morning I posted ‘caffeine is fantastic.’ Why would I do that? You think about it after the fact — well, that was not really necessary.”
Niedzviecki says he was surprised that the most ho-hum experiences seemed to attract the most viewers to his webcam footage. “That’s the allure of peep culture. . . It is so banal, you’re fascinated by its nothingness.”
He recalls that when he disconnected the video cameras he felt a little lost without his online fans. First there was the elation of being freed from the bonds of constant surveillance. Then, he says, “I fell into a kind of depressed state as I missed my followers and their constant presence watching every move of my life.”
He did not confuse friendship with followers. “I thought of them as people in my life, background. It’s not a real community and it’s not real friendship.”
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