We are all that we have met.

I’ve recently entertained myself by reading a book called Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors by Hal Niedzviecki, concerning the relatively recent phenomenon of social networking and camera technology and its relationship to obtrusive “overshare” and exposure by John and Jane Does via blogs, youtube, reality television etc. who have made names for themselves.

I enjoyed most of the book because Niedzviecki addresses the flaws and impracticality of reality television, the “art” of blogging to get attention from a community without a familiar face (strangers to the blogger), sharing one’s personal secrets to potentially make money and gain “fame,” and why we feel the absolute urge to post a 150-word tweet every hour or browse through the photos and statuses of our “friends” on Facebook.

He discusses how people are hardwired to gossip, shame, and expose. “One researcher studied daily conversation and concluded that 80 to 90 percent of human conversation is about ‘the immediate social world inhabited by us and the people we know.’” It is incredibly hard to not talk about mutual friends, acquaintances, or foes with a close buddy and with all of that superficiality (?) eliminated, how much left is there to talk about? A lot, I’m sure, but it takes practice to bring those sort of topics to surface instead.

He also made some worthy points about how it’s so easy for some bloggers to reveal the ins and outs of their daily experiences as well as their feelings about them to a population of strangers who devotedly read their blogs. He points out that because the blogger isn’t easily getting face-to-face feedback on what they’re sharing with each word or video, they lose perspective of censorship to the immensity of cyberspace…For me, when I write, I inevitably think about a few people whom I know read my blog; family members, some friends, etc. so because of that, it isn’t effortless for me to get carried away on tangents that I wouldn’t reveal to anyone and barely myself, I think before I type, I backspace on spelling errors or thoughts that may not make sense, in fact, I write most of my entries in Word before I paste it into WordPress.

What I didn’t like about the book was that sometimes, the topics felt jumbled and unorganized and often times, way too concentrated on one blogger who discusses her sex life and her child’s cancelled birthday party at Chuckie Cheese for instance (as if I care, or else I’d probably be reading her blog instead of this book). He covered a broad range of topics from the various blogger characters who have gained fame for their shameless overshare, to the successful Post Secret business that has made plenty of cash off of others’ artistically expressed confessions, to (my personal favorite) the amount of Facebook friends one has being contradictory to his/her real life connections; to me however, it was a bit overwelming.

Okay, so I’m actively involved in Facebook, blogging, and seldomly Twitter for “business” purposes, which means, I also take pleasure in watching myself update that potentially vast and faceless community beyond my awareness with photos of my adventures, postings of my daily do’s, my thoughts on yoga, fashion, and even lady boys. I invest too much time in watching my neighbors update a community which I’m made a part of on the status of his relationship, how she recently got a Google Voice account at 408-CallMee, or analyzing how the lyrics of the music video he recently posted up 5 minutes ago could reflect the current state of his life or if I have anything to do with it. Many of us can relate to Peep culture in some form another, especially when the majority of our social lives now depend on these various e-sources to let us know when our cousins’ birthdays are, where our friends are going tonight, or who is dating who and who “likes” it. It’s like a drug that takes me to a place where time flies by and I feel like I’m learning so much about my “friends” when really, I’m only seeing what they want to be seen.

In today’s technologically complex and savvy world, there are infinite resources to keep connected…myspace, facebook, twitter, wordpress, etc. It enables us to share a snippet (however simple, revealing, or fabricated) of our lives, perspectives, relationships, experiences, or absolutely nothings. Because of all those connections, now it takes great effort to become unconnected. Sure, you can easily throw your laptop, desktop, iPhone, and pager (does anyone have a pager anymore???) out the window and sit in the dark in your room or escape to some desolate sanctuary in the mountains, all in an effort to flee from the ringtones, text message alerts, “you’ve got mail,” etc. But in time, that would prove to be very costly. So now, technology like Google Voice enables you to choose to be completely available and/or completely unavailable customarily to your mum or rather the bugaboo whom you felt sorry for and gave your number to at the club last night hoping that he wouldn’t call anyway. Not only that, it’s apparently the “cool new thing” to have an account with since at this point, it’s by invitation only (made obvious by a few recent Facebook status updates saying “My Google Voice number bi*ches: 408-CallMee) because everyone else who doesn’t have an account deserves to be labeled as such. I feel more and more like the era which we live in here in the US is where one’s value and association are determined by the certain technologies that one owns and his/her striking ability to use it to efficiently sell themselves (since one’s identity is his/her product). And I’ve written all of this because I just don’t want to accept this sort of era…despite the irony of me expressing such thoughts via my very own online blog…

Stay tuned.
Yet another blogger