Della Rollins
When your new book hits the bookstores, you hope it gets attention. That is, you hope it gets the right kind of attention. You want praise for your writing style and careful scrutiny of your ideas. My book The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors recently appeared on a list of the top 25 summer reads in O magazine. Because O is Oprah Winfrey's magazine, and because anything connected to Oprah and books is automatically a big deal, I started getting pats on the back and various messages of congratulation. (Plus the offer to write this piece.) At the same time, a few naysayers and critics made it clear through snide asides that they thought being featured in O was the wrong kind of attention.
I think they are the ones in the wrong. And not just because, like every author, I'm hoping to sell a lot of books.
The Peep Diaries and Oprah's empire are made for each other. After all, Oprah is one of the original peep pioneers.
When The Oprah Winfrey Show went national in 1986, it ushered in a new era of talk television: television as confessional, television as catharsis, television as an entertaining way to discover that your problems and secrets are like as everyone else's problems and secrets. For better or worse, Oprah helped set in motion the culture of showing and telling that, today, characterizes everything from Jon & Kate Plus 8 to TMZ to hipster literary phenomena like Post Secret, Found, Cringe, Mortified and Moth. As a Time magazine critic wrote way back when about the stunning ascendance of the show: "Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah's eye.... They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as a group therapy session."
Oprah's show proved wildly entertaining not just because she could get people to open up, but because she opened up. Under the relentless glare of the cameras, she exposed her emotional problems and body image struggles (she once hauled a wagon of animal fat on stage to show her audience how much weight she'd shed).
Before Oprah, we were primarily entertained by watching others perform - anointed talents sang, danced, acted and otherwise took on the task of keeping us occupied during our leisure hours. We called it Pop Culture. But all along we wanted more. We didn't just want to watch. We wanted to be the anointed talents. We wanted to experience life on the screen. Enter Oprah, one of the first to understand the potential of this desire. Enter, today, an entire entertainment universe devoted pretty much exclusively to putting us - not them - in the driver's seat.
I call this new kind of entertainment Peep Culture. In Peep, we spend more and more of our leisure time watching and sharing. We watch everyday people go about their everyday lives and share our own lives with an ever-expanding circle of friends, associates, and stangers. Peep includes talk television, celebrity gossip - Stars! They're Just Like Us! - reality TV and, most recently, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google and so much more.
Who better to understand the allure, power and possible dangers of Peep Culture than Oprah herself? And, for that matter, where better to talk about the shift from Pop to Peep and its many myriad consequences then on talk television?
So I want to sit down with the famously empathetic host, and maybe some other people I profile in my book (like, say, Padme, who blogs anonymously both about her life as a stay-at-home mother and the erotic spankings she regularly receives as part of the master-slave relationship she has with her husband). I want to talk about how we've moved from talk show peep shows to a blanket Peep Culture that systemically encourages us to say and do things in front of an (invisible) audience that are often against our best interests.
Read the Globe's review
Now why would Oprah, of all people, want to have that conversation? The nod from O magazine got me looking at what Oprah's empire is up to these days. First I bought a copy of the magazine, then I checked out her website and scanned through a couple of her shows. I've noticed something. The Oprah of the 1980s and '90s has evolved. Her show is no longer focused on using her infectious compassion to extract maximum emotion and confession. This week on the show: "unconventional unforgettable dads"; a "special report on America's tent cities"; and "amazing kids". This is the kinder, gentler side of Peep Culture. The Oprah of today has moved away from prurient sensationalism. Oprah is now a rarity on television: a revered populist genuinely interested in enriching - as opposed to exposing - the inner lives of her constituents.
From an outsider perspective, it seems to me that at some point in the mid-to-late '90s, Oprah herself began to question, as I do, what the consequences are for a society devoted to Peep Culture. So, Oprah, I hope you read this and I hope you consider Peep Culture as a topic for your show. People are giving away parts of their lives that they will never get back. I want to help them understand how and why before it's too late. And I think you do too.
And as for the naysayers who claim Oprah's brand of entertainment doesn't have any room for serious discussion, I'd say do what I did and take a second look: A Peep pioneer has changed course.
Hal Niedzviecki is the author of The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. He lives in Toronto.