For a brief period last year, Hal Niedzviecki opened his life to the entire world. Or at least to a small online viewership.
As a Toronto-based writer and social commentator (and frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail), Niedzviecki has examined the roles of media and pop culture in the eight books he has penned. At the same time, the 38-year-old husband and father has consciously avoided modern technology and social networking. No cellphone, Facebook account or Twitter followers for him.
But he knew the territory. Niedzviecki explored the topic in his 2009 The Peep Diaries, which was selected by Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine as one of that summer’s must-read books.
Last year, he went deeper into the subject by allowing filmmakers Sally Blake and Jeannette Loakman to install cameras in his house for a three-month period and broadcast his life online around the clock. Niedzviecki also started a blog, jumped onto Facebook and Twitter and made efforts to get on a reality-TV show. His wife Rachel was not amused.
The resulting film, Peep Culture, documents Niedzviecki’s livecasting experiment and also follows him around North America to meet fellow webcasters and attend a reality-TV “boot camp” in California. He spoke to The Globe in Toronto last week.
How much have social media evolved since your book The Peep Diaries came out in 2009?
When I wrote the book, Twitter was in its experimental stage. I spent time with the guys running Twitter. They had five employees in a warehouse in San Francisco. They had plenty of time to hang out with me. By the time the book came out, Twitter had a billion or so users.
What was the effect of Oprah’s O magazine declaring your book a must-read?
The impact wasn’t like, wow, bestseller! I wasn’t on the show or anything. It’s fair to say that Peep Diaries wasn’t an Oprah-type book. The readers of O magazine were not looking for a slightly despairing, cynical analysis of mass media trends and how they affect individuality.
Why agree to broadcast yourself to the world in the documentary?
When the book came out, the passages people seemed to like the most were those when I tried out peep culture and reported what happened. Like the Facebook party I had where I invited 700 of my Facebook friends and only one showed up. People really responded to that.
Any regrets about opening up your life to the Internet 24/7?
The livecasting was obviously the most uncomfortable. It was invasive and intrusive, but also the most fulfilling in many ways and the most addictive. The more immersive it is, the more you start to forget about it.
How bizarre was it that people were watching your empty bathroom online – and chatting about it?
For those people, this is entertainment stripped down to its absolute nothingness. They were speculating on whether anyone would come in there and what they would like to see them doing. Those people chatting seem to be having an awful good time and a much better time than they would if they were at home watching Three’s Company.
How much strain did livecasting put on your marriage?
There were some shaky moments on the domestic front. You can see there’s considerable unhappiness as we’re trying to balance this whole thing. That’s part of the story of peep culture. Almost everybody we spent time with who livecasts all the time is single and alone. There’s a reason for that, because there are so many barriers you have to try to respect with other people, and it’s really hard to do.
You meet several individuals who’ve opened up their lives to the world. What’s their motive?
Some are palatably desperate for attention and community. There’s that loneliness of North American society, which is endemic in our everyday lives, and almost superimposed on that is our desire to be known, to be famous. And those things become conflated and confused. Even in people’s minds they no longer know if they’re doing something to meet new people and have community, or if they’re doing something to get fame and attention.
