25 Books You Can't Put Down

The Peep Diaries by Hal Niedzviecki

256 pages; City Lights

"You need to know. You need to be known." That is the compulsion fueling what cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki calls "peep culture, the bastard love child of gossip"—our mass addiction to twittering, tweeting, snooping, spying, blogging, gawking at reality TV and YouTube, spilling our secrets on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ping...the list goes on. "Call it surveillance with benefits," he writes of our consuming need for human connection in The Peep Diaries (City Lights), a virtual descent into the loneliest of worlds.

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