The Public Diaries :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

The Public Diaries Your secret loves and hates. Your tearful confessions. Your emotional epiphanies. A diary can be many things, but almost never is it something that's meant to be read by the entire world. Yet, with the availability of cheap, easy access space on the World Wide Web, a growing minority of internet users is laying its lives and loves out for anyone with a web browser to see. Such a paradox might seem like an unlikely basis for a new trend in web browsing, but in the last few years, the Internet has seen a veritable explosion of these "public" diarists. An online diary is simply a website on which the owner posts semiregular narrative about his or her life and thoughts. Just like a paper diary, it can be as fancy or as plain as you like — with JavaScript substituting for quill pens and shabby ten-cent notebooks replaced by geocities.com. Online diary-keeping has experienced huge growth over the past few years, going from only fifty or so journal websites in 1995 to over nine hundred today – and those are just the ones that signal their desire to be known by joining journal webrings or advertising on search engines. Together with diaries that remain "anonymous," and those kept in a language other than English, there might be thousands altogether. What's more, a large and thriving Internet community has sprung up around this community of diarists. You can read interviews with well-known diarists and news about online diaries , join a mailing list dedicated to the discussion of online journal-keeping , register your diary , or join any number of webrings devoted to categories as broad as new diarists (Chapter Two) and as specific as smokers (Smoke Rings). Indeed, the online journal-keeping community is something of a cross-section of society in general, represented by all age groups (though mostly GenXers), both genders, and all personality types. "There is nothing typical about a †¦ diarist," says Zach Garland of Zach’sMind. "The only similarity is they all love to express themselves online†¦ If these people were to meet in real life under completely random circumstances, it is doubtful even a third of them would give the other the time of day." But why would anyone want to keep his or her private diary on the Internet? The answers are as diverse as the diarists themselves. A survey of about fifty diarists conducted by The Mining Company, a company devoted to gathering statistics and information about all aspects of the Web, reveals that fully 50 percent are online because they want to "hone their writing skills.