Peep This

Have you ever wondered what’s the reason that blogging, facebook, reality TV, gossip mags (insert guilty voyeuristic pleasure/addiction here) are so prevalent? Especially amongst Generation Zrs?

I was actually thinking about this the other night. We have become so obsessed with what others are doing, saying, and thinking and we want that information now, in real time. We constantly view status changes, twitter streams, gossip shows and blogs, reality television programs, texts, email. It must be our thirst for human interaction but yet most of these activities are done alone, behind a screen. How ironic!

Further reading on the topic:

by Hal Niedzviecki

“You need to know. You need to be known.” That is the compulsion fueling what cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki calls “peep culture, the bastard love child of gossip”—our mass addiction to twittering, tweeting, snooping, spying, blogging, gawking at reality TV and YouTube, spilling our secrets on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ping…the list goes on.

“Call it surveillance with benefits,” he writes of our consuming need for human connection in The Peep Diaries (City Lights), a virtual descent into the loneliest of worlds.
Als coming in the Fall:

by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler

“Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as society. Hillary Clinton wrote that it takes a village.

In their new book, Christakis and Fowler write, “We don’t live in groups, we live in networks,” and they back this up with dozens of interconnected stories of research findings by themselves and others, ranging from bank runs to suicide prevention, from nut allergies among schoolchildren to epidemics in virtual worlds, from the spread of happiness to the spread of voting.

The combination of speculation and science is fascinating and leaves me eager to learn about the next wave of research in this area.”-Andrew Gelman, author of Red State, Blue State
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