Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
Posted by: Hal
Some interesting thoughts in this piece with the main theme: “in the world of social media, nothing is real”.
Very refreshing to read something thoughtful that connects the various silo-ed categories media usually puts this stuff in. Which is to say that the writer, Denise Ryan, looks at a the doc-moc trend, and explores the way ‘networking’ is changing in the era of social media, and takes a snapshot of the big picture of Peep Culture.
All that plus commentary from yours truly and a shout out to my upcoming talk at Canzine West!

Posted by: Hal
Hey everyone, I’ll be doing a Peep talk in Vancouver as part of Canzine West: festival of zines and underground culture. I’ll be talking about the rise of Peep Culture and exploring Peep phenomenon specifically as they pertain to independent culture creators, namely: is Peep the triumph of indie, or its destruction? So, if you are in the Vancouver area, please drop by. And there’s tons more stuff going on at Canzine West!
Canzine West runs from 1–7pm and the Peep Talk happens from 2–3pm.
Details:
Saturday, October 16, 2010
at Canzine West
W2 Storyeum
Vancouver—151 West Cordova Street
$5 admission comes with a free copy of the Fall issue of Broken Pencil Magazine – issue 49 “Last Puppet Standing”
http://www.brokenpencil.com/canzine/

Posted by: Hal
Hey everyone, here’s a short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why, despite all the warnings about privacy online, we just can’t bring ourselves to care nearly as much as we should.
A taste: “Oh but haven’t recent polls demonstrated that we are more concerned than ever about our privacy online? Sure they have. But they have also shown that our concern doesn’t actually translate into action. We may tell pollsters we are concerned about our privacy, but we don’t actually do much about it. Surprisingly few of us can actually be bothered to adjust the privacy settings available to us. (A Pew Research Study put the number of us who change Facebook privacy settings in the 25 percent to 44 percent range, which is to say that not even half of us are motivated to protect our most intimate details by taking five minutes to click a few buttons.)”
Read in full:
Posted by: Hal
Here’s an article in the New York Times about how Facebook is struggling to deal with the pages of deceased. They used to delete them. Now family or friends can request to have the page turned into a memorial, frozen in time save for the comments that those who have already been accepted as ‘friends’ can continue to post.
The assumption from Facebook (not questioned by the Times) is that this problem can be solved through technology – we just need better algorithms more capable of determining when someone has died so that their page can be then locked down with all necessary sensitivity.

But our widespread embrace of Peep Culture suggests that we might want something else: new ways to continue living on through social media after our deaths. Why should the dead not be allowed to have any new ‘friends’ (when, after all, those friends are entirely virtual and illusory anyway?). Why can’t the dead decline to attend events, leave comments on other people’s pages, etc. etc. Why shouldn’t the dead continue to discuss their own wants and needs?
Perhaps in the future we will pay people to continue to maintain our various profiles and blogs after we are gone? (In the Jewish tradition, it is not uncommon to hire a Yeshiva student to say the required daily prayers Jewish law requires be said for the dead.) I know, I know, this is getting pretty weird. Nonetheless, the dead have more in common than the living when it comes to their online presence. The dead are disembodied, the dead are virtual, the dead exist only in the bits and bytes of our imaginations. And the dead, like our Facebook profiles, live on forever, long after we are gone.
Posted by: Hal
The Peep Diaries is described as a “bracingly informal book” in a 5 book essay/review that appeared in the recent issue of the London Review of Books. Check out the whole piece here. The other books discussed are
The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook by Ben Mezrich
The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future by Craig Watkins
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin
The Tyranny of Email: The Four Thousand Year Journey to your Inbox by John Freeman

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
February, 2011
January, 2011
December, 2010
November, 2010
October, 2010
September, 2010
{social_sites}-
{/social_sites}
{/lg_social_bookmarks}