Opinion: From Pop Culture to Peep Culture

(Aug. 19) -- Everyone is in a frenzy about Internet privacy. Congress debates it, watchdogs issue warnings, and daily headlines urge us to watch what we do online (headlines that go out of their way to scare us into being terrified of everything from Facebook redefining privacy to so-called sextortion).

Everyone is in a frenzy -- everyone, that is, but the majority of people who use the Internet who continue to throw ourselves into the Net's entangling arms with wanton abandon.

Once in the Net's cephalopodic embrace, we facilitate our own consumption, signing up for Facebook, tweeting relentlessly, uploading geo-tagged pics from iPhones (the new no-no) -- in short, diving directly down the monster's yawning maw and into the very belly of the beast.

Despite the heated rhetoric, all the warning articles aren't having much of an effect. Among many other barometers, this summer Facebook topped half a billion users and will very soon have a user base that is double the population of the United States. (See articles like Facebook Privacy Woes Make Little Impact on Growth for more details on the ongoing growth of the world's most popular social media site.)

The evidence -- steady growth in usage, steady increase in what and how much we share -- is clear. We love to share and reveal, and we aren't stopping no matter how many think-tanks, investigative reports and on-campus wellness interventions tell us to.

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.)

So why don't we care? The answer lies in a profound transition in our mass culture. We are moving from pop culture to peep culture. In the age of pop culture, we were entertained by anointed celebrities who performed for us. In the age of peep, we are increasingly being entertained by each other.

You tweet about your diet, he tweets about his insomnia. You post a video of your kid high on post-dental-surgery drugs, I post a video of myself lip-syncing a Romanian pop song. You upload a picture of me at the wild party we were at last night, I upload a picture of you at the wild party we were at last night.

Peep is slowly but surely becoming the new pop. The more we seek to entertain each other by sharing the details of our lives, the less privacy enters into the equation.

That doesn't mean that privacy doesn't matter. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be concerned with what third parties, whether corporate, governmental or individual, are doing with our personal information. (Though at times the concerns frantically raised by the rapacious media seem wildly overblown.)

What the rise of peep culture means is that despite the warnings and the demonstrably negative consequences, we will continue to peep. We will continue to seek attention, friendship, community, notoriety, fame and even financial reward by posting our everyday details online. All our lives, we've been bombarded with the fantasy of becoming celebrities. And now we are living the dream. (As one blogger once told me: even if I only have 20 people following my life, that's still 20 more people than I could ever have had before.)

For so many us, the dream seems to have come true. So why do they keep trying to wake us up into this nightmare?

Hal Niedzviecki is the author of three books about technology, culture and individuality, including the critically acclaimed "The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors," which is being adapted into a feature-length documentary. Read his blog on Red Room.