hal tweets ·11:28 AM
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
2009,
15:58 GMT
Peep Night at the Toronto Festival of Authors
Posted by: Hal
Hey everyone, Peep Night at the International Festival of Authors is quickly coming up. It’s tomorrow night. Get complete info and buy your tickets here. It’s going to be awesome. It includes some talk by me, the band FoxFire jamming to weird YouTube vids, a round table discussion about how peep is changing writing and our attitude to writers (with Lauren Kirshner, Dani Couture and Jennifer Cowan), an audience participation moment with photographer Dean Baldwin, plus video testimonials by Yann Martel, Larry Gaudet, Karen Connelly, and more!
Check out the Peep Show official IFOA trailer.
Hope to see ya there!
Hal.
2009,
17:09 GMT
Tweeting Secrets from the Banff Centre
Posted by: Hal
Hi everyone, I’ll be collecting secrets from the Vistas dining room during lunch hour at The Banff Centre for the Arts. The secrets will be shown on wide screen televisions to the four hundred people dining including a United Church conference, a gaggle of school kids at a dance retreat, all the artists at Banff and, of course, the attendees and participants at Calgary/Banff author’s festival WordFest. You can follow the action by following my twitter account or searching on twitter for comments hashtagged #wordfest. It’s rolling from 12 to 1:30 mountain time, 2 to 3:30 eastern time.
I’m also doing a lecture – From Pop to Peep – at the Banff centre at 5pm as part of Wordfest. So if you’re in the area, come on by!
Will try and let everyone know how it goes later on today or tomorrow.
2009,
23:26 GMT
Thoughts on the University of Western Ontario Arrest Video
Posted by: Hal
I’ve been thinking about the video recently posted to YouTube showing a young man being subdued and handcuffed by police in a University of Western Ontario campus building. The story has been getting widespread coverage in Canadian newspapers. I googled some key words and found it’s been reported everywhere from the CBC to the Winnipeg Free Press to The Medicine Hat News.
Normally, a minor incident like this wouldn’t merit much or any coverage in, say, The Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail. But because there is video that they can embed in their various online editions, what would normally be no story is big news. But what’s the news? The papers don’t really know what to do with the story. They need to find some way to justify this story beyond “arrest of college student who is probably having some kind of mental breakdown and will hopefully get the help he needs and continue on with his life.” That doesn’t justify coverage. So for the Star, which has offered two pieces on this already, most recently “Violent campus arrest sparks YouTube furor”, the story is that the video is stirring up outrage and scandal.
But the Star article, and other similar stories about this incident, provides very little concrete evidence to suggest that many people are actually upset about the actions of police. The Star quotes anonymous posts to YouTube. Guess what? On YouTube a video of a guy picking his nose can “spark a furor.” No named students are quoted complaining, no protests are noted, no family members are documented expressing their outrage and vowing to sue. The Star doesn’t even bother to quote the guy who posted the video who writes on his YouTube page “I posted this as a witness to the event, from the scene, not because of any agenda.” Better ignore that statement since the main note of protest that the papers seem to be relying on is the fact of the video itself. The feeling is obviously that because someone took a video and posted it to YouTube, and because that video shows the police using force on someone, the video must have been shot and posted in order to function as some kind of protest.
Alas, there is no protest and the video is not particularly shocking, scandalous or revealing. The reason this is being reported nationally and even internationally is because there is a real video of real people in a real violent situation in an attention getting place (a college campus). That’s why the articles, like the Globe and Mail’s “Video of forceful arrest on campus sparks online debate”, don’t seem to be anything in particular. Because the real story is that there is a video of a “forceful arrest.” Beyond that, there’s no reason — from a journalistic, sociological or even a crime deferent point of view — to have this story be reported outside of the local area and campus media.
The headlines elsewhere should basically read: “Here is a video of a violent struggle. Enjoy.”
2009,
15:31 GMT
The Loneliness Scourge
Posted by: Hal
Winnipeg Free Press columnist Tom Ford has a piece out today about what he calls “the scourge of loneliness.” It’s an interesting piece citing, among other things, a new book I want to read called Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo. The piece also cites The Peep Diaries and the story of my failed Facebook party. He makes the very valid point that it’s people in middle age (like me?) who tend to be the most lonely. They’re too old for the college-age bar scene, and too young for senior living. Anyway, nicely written short column that raises the question, again, of how modern society’s structure is contributing to the rise of peep.
2009,
23:48 GMT
Teens Film Assaults and Hal Talks Peep: all in the Same City!
Posted by: Hal
So I went to the Edmonton Journal to read the an article about peep culture, but a different story caught my eye first. Trio of teens film assaults, reads the headline.
I checked out the article and discovered that three teenagers assaulted two different random women at the West Edmonton Mall on the same night. The teens, two girls and guy, thought it would be fun to have one of them beat on somebody while the other two filmed the attack on a cell phone and encouraged whoever was doing the beating.
The police have arrested the teens and recovered the cell phone. One of the investigators said this: “It’s bizarre. It was just a really strange thing. It was a first for me as an investigator to come across someone actually filming a very vicious assault and a robbery within an hour of each other. We actually recovered the phone and the filming of the incident is really going against them. It’s like the final nail in the coffin.”
Wow. Welcome to Peep culture. I finally made it to the article about peep wondering if anyone else would read these two stories and make the connection. We’ll see. Here’s the opening of the interview:
The interview with Hal Niedzviecki is off to a limping start.
The Canadian culture critic answers the phone in a distracted sort of way, with the sound of click-clicking in the background.
I know that sound. It’s the sound of attention in split screen: Phone conversation one side, Internet conversation on the other.
Me: “Are you addicted to the Internet, Hal?”
Niedzviecki: “No. Maybe. Yes.”
Nice. Read the rest of this interview in the Edmonton Journal.
The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
EXPOZINE 2011, Montreal’s 10th Annual Small Press, Comic and Zine Fair—http://t.co/3ISW3Ovx http://t.co/FlLfB6hk
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