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Hal Niedzviecki's THE PEEP DIARIES:
How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors
(City Lights Publications)

May 19th, 7:30 pm
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen St. West, Toronto

http://thepeepdiaries.com

One man's journey through a rapidly transforming culture of lying, spying, revealing, and confessing.

"A snapshot of a world in profound transformation. Compelling and creepy."
–Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo

About the Launch: Join Hal as he takes you on a multimedia tour of our new world: Peepville. In Peepville, Hal will show you such notable features as streets lined with surveillance cameras, daycares equipped with webcams, and citizens eager to track themselves. Behind all those cameras, cell phones and profiles are real people. It’s time to meet your neighbors, the peeps of Peepville! Hal will introduce to you such Peepville luminaries as the digicam vigilante behind John.tv, the masterminds of Twitter, a Star Wars obsessed sex slave housewife blogger, and so much more! Let Hal be your guide as you stroll down the Peepville walk of fame honoring the Star Wars Kid, Dog Shit Girl, Washingtonienne, and David After the Dentist. But what’s Hal’s stake in this? The more Hal talks about Peepville, the more it becomes clear that he’s just another lonely, confused citizen looking for friendship, attention, community, and respect. Will Hal find what he’s looking for? When Hal invites his 700 Facebook friends to a party and only one shows up, it’s a wake-up call. Can Hal escape Peepville? Does he even want to?

About the Peep Diaries: We have entered the age of "Peep culture": a tell-all, show-all, know-all digital phenomenon that is dramatically altering notions of privacy, individuality, security and even humanity. Peep culture is Reality TV, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, amateur porn, surveillance and more. With hilarious, exasperated acuity, social critic Hal Niedzviecki dives into Peep, joining every social network that will have him, monitoring the movements of his wife, hiring private detective websites to investigate his father, and trying out for Reality TV. Part travelogue, part diary, part meditation and social history, The Peep Diaries explores a rapidly emerging digital phenomenon that is radically changing not just the entertainment landscape, but also the firmaments of our culture and society.

For more information on THE PEEP DIARIES, please go to:
http://thepeepdiaries.com
Hal’s blog, plus complete info about the book and the upcoming documentary

Praise for THE PEEP DIARIES
"If you've found yourself obsessively posting to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – and becoming a little uneasy about how it's changing your life – you should read this book. The Peep Diaries is a superb investigation into how technology is shifting the landscape of our private lives." –Clive Thompson, Wired magazine columnist

"A cogent and penetrating analysis. I certainly hope, as The Peep Diaries suggests, that the cruel spectacle we're witnessing on the tube most evenings actually holds some hope for a more loving future." –Douglas Rushkoff, author of Media Virus and Life, Inc.

“Niedzviecki’s smart mixture of reportage and reflection avoids alarmism and hype while capturing the strange power of our urge to see and be seen.” – Publisher’s Weekly on The Peep Diaries