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October 29, 2010

Strange But True!

Q. How has the “pop culture” of yesterday become the “peep culture” of today?

A. More and more of our entertainment is derived from watching ourselves and others go about our lives, says Paul McFedries of IEEE Spectrum magazine. Picture, for example, those thousands of “camgirls” and “camboys” who broadcast themselves over the Web (digital peep shows). For some kids, elaborates writer Susan Hopkins, webcams offer them identities because “they're like, you know, sorta kinda on TV, and only important people appear on TV.” It's that omnipresent eye of the webcam validating their existence: “I cam, therefore I am.” Huge numbers of us are now blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, Flickring, and YouTubing at least some details of our lives, joining writer-thinker Hal Niedzviecki's “peep culture,” a term that plays on the “pop culture” of 1959 (which actually goes back to 1854, according to the Oxford English Dictionary).


 
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