网络时代催生“窥探”狂人

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“窥探文化(peep culture)”这个表达是对流行文化(pop culture)这个短语的一种恶搞，是由多伦多作家兼社会评论家哈尔-涅兹维奇首创的 Peep culture is a play on pop culture, the term was coined by Toronto writer and social commentator Hal Niedzviecki.

Riding herd on conformist rebels

In part, Niedzviecki brings de Tocqueville up to date, explaining what it means for the "innumerable multitude of men" to find themselves "incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glue their lives." Of course, updating de Tocqueville means looking at pop culture in all its permutations. Niedzviecki has an insatiable appetite for video games, reality TV, theme parks and the unending merchants of cool. He swallows whole the world of the mass media and spits it out in a darkly pessimistic view that might make a cynic cringe.

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For the most part, Niedzviecki sees a totalitarian world in which genuine rebellion has been bought out and genuine rebels bought off. Unlike McLuhan, who looked optimistically in "Understanding Media" toward the new "global village," or Gladwell, who argued in "The Tipping Point" that "little things can make a big difference," the author of "Hello, I'm Special" has few if any encouraging words to say.

"There is no clear way to move outside the system, because everything we know is the system," he insists. Then, too, he believes that no one will ever escape until we can think our way out of the box we're in. "Ultimately, what we need is a conceptual methodology," he argues, and one can imagine him going back to the library to read and study still more.

Niedzviecki, who was born in 1971, appears in many ways to be a quintessential post-1960s young intellectual in an age defined by globalism. Fully aware that many of yesterday's rebels have become members of today's establishment and that revolutionary icons like Che Guevara are today's marketing tools, he can hardly be blamed for his suspicion of radicals and his extreme caution about anything that smacks of revolution. The only real world he's known has been that of "The Reagan Revolution" and "The Dodge revolution," a world in which the illegal downloading of music seems to him and many of his peers the only alternative to corporate rule.

"Hello, I'm Special" reads like an autobiography of a young man who wants to be famous and still have his dignity, to be rebellious without feeling like a fraud. Moreover, and ironically, given his thoughts on modern individuality, the book also reads like the autobiography of a generation suspicious of collective action -- a generation not unlike the Silent Generation at the start of the 1950s.

"I cannot ignore the fact that I don't want to band together," Niedzviecki writes. "I want to be the lone rebel, the dangerous outsider, the solitary hero." His longing for a romantic rebellion of his own is also the story of almost every generation of rebels in America over the past 100 years, from the Greenwich Village bohemians to the Beats, from the hippies to Generation X and beyond.

By turns infuriating and illuminating, "Hello, I'm Special" does not seem likely to please Niedzviecki's peers, or the present generation of narcissistic college students, many of whom have decreed themselves celebrities though they've done nothing to deserve that status. "Hello, I'm Special" may not please anyone, in fact. After all, who wants to be told, as Niedzviecki tells his readers, in no uncertain terms, that ours is "a dying culture."