Peep Culture

Welcome to Peepville, USA, population 300 million and growing. We used to have our fun watching make-believe characters. But then we all got wired up and started exchanging our own real-life sto­ries, pictures and movies. That's when we realized we like peep cul-j ture more than pop culture. So now we spend our free time watch-J ing ourselves and one another. We have blogs, social networks, webcams, chat rooms, surveillance cameras, paparazzi, podcasts and all kinds of ways to keep ourselves entertained. Residents of Peepville not only love watching, they love being watched. It's fun, but it's also confusing. When is a secret camera in the bathroom amusing fodder for the Internet, and when is it an invasion of pri­vacy? Can I make money blurting out my innermost feelings on TV? Can I be elected to higher office by telling the story of how my teen­age daughter got pregnant but it's okay because she's marrying her boyfriend? Things were a lot simpler when we lived in Popville. But that doesn't mean Peepville is a bad place to live. It just means we didn't know what we were getting into when we started uploading our sex lives, applying to Big Brother 8 and storing our day-to-day agendas on Google Calendar data clouds. So in the interest of fur­thering our integration into this new world order, here are seven things you need to know about peep culture. m

Seven Thing3 You Should Know— A Our New World Order =