The Peep Diaries by Hal Niedzviecki

Author:Hal Niedzviecki [Niedzviecki, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

With neither old-style community nor new-style shaming to rely on, Peep culture, the bastard love child of gossip, continues to get weirder and weirder, further and further removed from the rules of civility and probity that still govern most face-to-face interaction. Students shame their teachers, teachers shame their students, neighbors shame their neighbors, corporations invite people to shame themselves, and professional shamers troll the streets, looking for video opportunities to cash in on. The result is the increasingly ghoulish specter of shame-for-fun intertwined with for-profit systems that encourage us to shame ourselves and others. The bizarre story of Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minnesota, shows just how strange and removed from what was once considered normal behavior all this can get. A few years back, a depressed and disturbed Henderson took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. His family mourned and his classmates flocked to the young man’s MySpace page where they left condolences and remembrances, many of them resonant of the twisted logic of the adolescent set. Wrote one poster: Mitch is “an hero [sic] to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back.” From there, Mitch’s page was linked to MyDeathSpace.com, a particularly bizarre manifestation of Peep that finds news reports, obituaries, and whatever else its administrators can archive regarding a person’s death, and links them to the deceased’s MySpace page.

Before we get back to Mitch’s story, let’s linger for a minute on MyDeathSpace—an online community as macabre as it is

addictive. I spent several hours on the site, roaming between death notices and MySpace profiles, some festooned with commemorations, others left eerily static. For instance, the site of Melody Corona who, according to DeathSpace, died in her sleep at age seventeen of a Xanax overdose, shows a vibrant young woman—in one photo she playfully flips us the bird—and her own introduction to her life: “THE name is Melody Sunshine Corona. <-- m’hm THAT is my real name, ASKKK ABOUTT ME!! I am only but 17 years old;; but dont judge me by my age, or at all, i grew up fast, if you dont like it “ohhh f*ckin well. i was born && raised here in San Antonio, TX. i no longer attend school;; but im goin for that GED.” Her mood is listed as eccentric and the quote above her profile picture reads: “Sometimes it’s good thing to have fake people in this world, helps you find out who your real friends are.” Melody’s real friends have probably long since stopped visiting this eerie digital waxwork. But the rest of us—lurkers looking for the next momentary Peep thrill—well, we’ll keep coming.

In fact, we apparently kept coming to Mitch’s MySpace page too. A reference to a lost iPod on the page’s long list of remembrances titillated some of the people who came via MyDeathSpace to peer in on the proceedings. They latched on to the

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