Keep me Posted

This is a ‘blog versus diary’ debate. Well, not really a debate but rather an attempt to understand how did people make the transition from the absolute private to the absolute public.
Expression Engines
It is not just blog. It is also MSN and my space. It is the long hours sitting in front of a PC (or a MAC) and talking to friends, old and new, living next to you or at the end of the world. When it comes to communication, I find nothing wrong. I actually believe that we do not talk much; or to be accurate, we may talk but we do not listen. It is the quality and not the quantity of the discussions that we have even with our closest friends that lacks something. So if we can find an expression engine that will free us and will enhance our communication, great!! What we may need for that is to feel free to express our inner thoughts, to skip the second thoughts that make us pretend and to be honest, firstly to ourselves and then to the others.
Dear Diary
For many people, their diary was always the ‘place’ where all their thoughts were safely expressed, hidden from the eyes of the world. Diaries existed before Anna Frank and Bridget Jones, less glamorous or celebrated than these famous ones, but always a shelter for all the things that someone could not say in public. It is true that diary is more of a ‘girl’s’ thing rather a boy’s. It is also true that some people write in their diaries the events of their day and that can be very boring indeed. (Actually that is the reason why I could never keep a diary no matter how hard I tried in my childhood and adolescent years) But if your diary is not just an agenda but helps you analyze your feelings towards situations, then it is a friend-but hopefully not your only friend. Furthermore, there is always this mixture of feelings when you go back to previous diaries and see yourself growing in them, laughing with events and situations that seemed horrible when you were writing about them. It is not always pleasant to go back to the person you were before becoming the person you are now but at least it is just you spotting those differences. Think about it: What gives a diary its special position it occupies is its secrecy. It is a private, personal ‘temple’ that no one has access except for its owner. So when I hear people saying that blog is the diary of the 21st century, I can’t help thinking that this is not really the case.
Welcome to Blogland
I have a friend whose blog I read regularly, almost everyday. And the funny thing is that she is one of my flatmates. So actually, apart from being friends, we live together. And we study at the same college, although we are in different departments. What I am trying to say is that if there is one person that knows what is going on in her life, this is me. I don’t really need to read at her blog her almost daily ‘adventures’ because even when I am not part of them,I learn them from her while drinking tea and eating cookies. So why do I read her blog? Good question. Well, I guess I enjoy the way she writes; I like to read it as if I am reading a novel or something. Because when you see your life on paper (or in this case at a computer screen), this life is fictionalised. I can totally understand the reasons that someone would have a blog. So that friends or family who are away can keep up with your life. Or so that you can make new friends with whom you can share the same interests or experience. But how much can you actually write in a blog? I guess this depends on the type of person you are but I doubt that most of us would write what we would write in a diary or confess to our closer friends. Can you write that you are still in love with your ex when you pretend to him and to everyone else that you don’t care anymore? Can you write about the way you felt so alone that night in the pub despite the fact that all your friends were there? Can you write that sometimes you wish some terrible things for people that you actually love and although you soon regret it, you know you wished that at some point? Or that you hate your boss? When everybody will have access to your writing? Maybe some people could and will. But most, I believe they won’t.
In a life that becomes less and less private every day, where our actions are monitored by CCTV and we are encouraged to keep nothing for ourselves, I believe that a diary will always be an escape for all the things that refuse to go public.