Online Diaries Grow Up

Dateline: 06/09/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide To Personal Web Pages

Web diaries are a much derided genre. Like almost everything on the Net, they have been defined by their extremes: boring what-I-did-today minutiae on the one hand and embarrassing "peek-a-boo" revelations on the other. The ultimate insult? The way Yahoo categorizes them: Entertainment: Humor, Jokes, & Fun: Writing: Diaries.

I've even had some online diarists ask me to call them "journalers" to try to escape the stereotype.

Well I'm here to tell you that the online diary is now one of the Web's mature art forms, and a healthy and burgeoning one to boot. I can baldly state that there are many online diaries worth reading for their fine writing and increasingly visual style. Yes, they satisfy my voyeuristic impulse, but I also believe in them.

The best online diarists are using the raw materials of their own lives and weathering the vagaries of a new medium to address such difficult questions as what it means to be a writer, the dividing line between the private and the public, even the definition of a diary itself.

The beginning

First, some history. I join with many online diarists in dating the phenomenon to January 3, 1995, the first entry in Carolyn Burke's diary. Carolyn is probably the most famous online diarist (she was recently pictured on the cover of U.S. News in regard to the 24 Hours in Cyberspace project) and whatever you think of her diary, it is the bellwether.Open Pages Webring, or linked collection of diaries. Open Pages, which began in July 1996, has established itself as the central listing place for online diaries and the hub of a close, and occasionally deeply contentious, community. It defines a diary quite broadly, requiring a minimum of monthly updates and archived entries, but otherwise not imposing any subjective tests.

Right now there are more than 160 diaries listed in Open Pages with 7-10 added per month. There's quite a bit of attrition on the list, however, since a significant subset give up online journaling after just a few months. It's very difficult and time-consuming; one diarist has even compiled a list of reasons not to do it. Indeed, these two farewell messages, from the popular Coffee Shakes and I Am Becoming diaries, reveal how risky exposing personal information can be. The loss of Coffee Shakes in particular shook the diary world, since it was a role model for many young, female journalers.

Signs of maturity

So why do I think online diaries have matured? There's a core group of 30-40 diaries that have lasted more than a year (some for two) and that show incredible progress in terms of voice and organization. And there's been a recent surge of interest among diarists to subcategorize themselves by gender, frequency of entries, etc., into smaller Webrings and collections.

There have also been debates about setting stricter standards for inclusion in Open Pages and discussions of how to enable diarists to critique each other in a healthy way. All these impulses indicate to me that online diarists have reached a rather high level of self-awareness about the peculiarity of what they are doing and are trying to reach some consensus about it.

Through my Diary of the Week, I've already begun highlighting outstanding journals. But voices that speak to me may leave you cold. Visit Open Pages with an open mind (there's a helpful page that includes snippets from each journal). I challenge you to come away without another life reverberating in your head.