Where have all the secrets gone?

I remember being a young teenager and keeping a diary and writing my thoughts and feelings down, hiding it in my room so my mum or sister could not read it. However this was only a fad to me, and I was never really serious about keeping the contents up to date. Although I did have friends who had diaries, who kept them under lock and key away from prying eyes, only showing the contents of their thoughts and secrets to their closest of friends. Only in the twentieth century did the diary become synonymous with secrecy and privacy; the now traditional book that comes with lock and key (underscoring both the clandestine nature of the contents and their value) is a product of the early 1900s (Culley, 1985). Now day’s people are using the social media sites as diaries, writing their feelings and daily activities online for everyone to view and readers then have the opportunity to categorise people. Facebook is an extremely popular site for which there are many participants, some whom will eagerly share their personal issues with their hundred or so online friends. Blogs are also quite popular too, and I feel that blogs and diaries can be quite similar. You may start out with a diary of your day to day events and thoughts, and can easily change the genre of that writing into a blog by making it available to read online. In the culture of mediated voyeurism/exhibitionism that permeates the internet, and which carries over to internet diaries from their print culture

association with reading others’ “private” (secret) writing, this subtly accessible audience design allows readers to maintain that sense of reading the “real” thing, the thrill of peeking into online lives (McNeill 2011). The “Online Diary Site”, http://www.my-diary.org/  is a free personal diary site you can join and participate regularly on and you have the choice to remain a private user or share your writing with the public. The genre of the paper diary has now moved into the space of the cyber world and people do not seem to mind sharing their business with readers on the web.

References

Culley,M. (Ed.). (1985). A day at a time: The diary literature of American women from 1764

    to the present. New York: Feminist Press.

McNeill, L. (2011). Diary 2.0? : A genre moves from page to screen, in Rowe, C. & Wyss,

     E.L. (Eds.) Language and new media: Linguistic, cultural, and technological evolutions

(pp. 313-325). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.

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