A Survey Of Online Diarists: Part Three

Dateline: 12/08/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide To Personal Web Pages

Welcome to a literary and historical oddity: the public diary.

Of course, there have always been diaries kept with an eye toward a future audience of family members or even general publication. But the keeping of a diary instantaneously in public view - this is something new.

This third article on the results of my survey of online diarists will continue to explore the What and Why of Web diaries (see Part One and Part Two). We've reached the most difficult series of questions and answers from which to draw definitive conclusions, especially since the diarists themselves resist labels at every turn, as you'll soon see.

One question, however, inspired near unanimity:

Who is the persona in your diary?
Me	86%
Part of me	10%
An imagined persona	0%
Other	4%

It's often said that on the Web you are who you say you are. To many, this implies an online world full of deception, of made-up characters. I've never felt this fakery to be characteristic of online diaries, and these results back me up.

Yet this question, I realize now, implies a black-and-white universe that instead is shades of gray. As Justin Hall (Links.net) replied: "All of the above - What's me? What's real? Oy."

The diarists who answered "part of me" and "other" indicated that the voice they've developed in their journals can represent - or overrepresent - an aspect of themselves, rather than their personality as a whole. Indeed, the journaling voice may embody traits the diarist would like to emulate in real life.

Rather than fooling with imaginary characters, diarists tend to experiment with their identities in ways that may allow them to express and develop certain aspects of their personalities at the expense of others. Their online diaries are the laboratory.

So what is it, already?

When it comes to describing their online diaries, the survey found little consensus.

Please choose the term (just one) that best describes your online diary:
Traditional diary	17%
A new kind of diary	25%
Autobiographical/personal essay	30%
Autobiographical novel	2%
Rant	2%
Letter to strangers	8%
Letter to family/friends	6%
Theme diary such as a recovery journal or dream diary	10%

Before I discuss these results, let me share a quote from Thomas Mallon, author of A Book Of One's Own: People And Their Diaries (Ticknor & Fields, 1984), a wonderful look at the private diary through history. I emailed him some time back to ask if an online diary can be considered a diary in anything like a traditional sense:

A majority of the diarists surveyed appear to agree with him: the 25% who checked "a new kind of diary" and the 30% who marked "autobiographical/personal essay." Several diarists even used the same analogy of the newspaper column. [My favorite write-in response to this question: "a spiritual refrigerator."]

There's a great deal of diversity of purpose and format within the diary community. Many diaries do read like personal essays, soapboxes even. But then you'll come across one that shimmers with feeling, that revels in revelation, and there's a shock of recognition: Hey, this is a diary after all.

To me, the personal essay and newspaper column descriptives are somehow lacking. Many diaries, at least the ones I return to again and again, go deeper than that, touch deeper than that. They inspire a feeling of intimacy. They exist somewhere along the continuum between one-to-one and one-to-many communication, rather than at either extreme.

Diary experience

It's interesting that 82% of the respondents have kept a private diary at some point in their lives (34% still do in addition to their online efforts). These are people for whom an online diary may be just one stage in their journaling experience. I asked the diarists who keep offline versions to explain how those diaries differ from their online counterparts. A representative response: The diarists appear to have hated the next question.

As an online diarist do you consider yourself (check all that apply):
A Web celebrity	4%
An exhibitionist	14%
A public figure	8%
A writer	44%
An innovator	12%
None of the above	44%

They don't much criticize themselves: Only 14% admit to exhibitionist tendencies. Neither do they puff themselves up: A mere 4% see themselves as Web celebs, and just 12% as innovators. A large contingent rejected all of my suggested terms. This is crowd that hates labels.

But a fair number (44%) do view themselves as "writers." And since we know from earlier survey results that only 9% are actually employed in a field that involves journalism/creative writing/communications, that's something to chew on.

As Mallon says in the introduction to his tome: "... writing books is too good of an idea to be left to authors." And certainly the Web has broadened, perhaps redefined, the idea of "publication." Many online diarists do not believe that the imprimatur of a media organization is required for them to consider themselves legitimate authors of their own stories.

They embrace the term writer simply because they do a heck of a lot of writing. For some, at least, the fact that those words are in public view is ancillary rather than central to this belief.

And finally:

The reason my diary is online (check all that apply):
I want feedback from people I know	28%
I want feedback from people I don't know	50%
I want to hone my writing in front of an audience	50%
I want to become a Web celebrity	14%
I want to reach out to others who face similar problems/challenges	48%
I just like the Web and it seemed natural to me	76%

Online diarists rountinely point out that a singular benefit of the online journal versus the offline is that it imposes a responsibility to write often and to at least attempt to write well. Journaling irregularly and incoherently will earn you neither readers, nor feedback, and what is the purpose without those?

Many diarists feel that their sites can help people who face similar challenges; this is especially true among those who keep diaries focused around a theme of recovery, whether from illness, addiction, abuse, etc. Indeed, it is common for diarists to receive requests for advice on all sorts of personal matters.

I'm not at all surprised by the finding that more than two-thirds of the diarists climbed the mountain because it's there ("I just like the Web..."). The Web is a powerfully attractive platform - for some it's almost a belief system - and the desire to be at the vanguard of personal expression on this new, universal publishing system is not something that should be dismissed as faddish or (primarily) exhibitionistic.

Revealing themselves on the Web feels "natural." These are people who have met their medium.

Readers, rejoice!

Overall, the survey results bolstered my opinion that online diaries are the most interesting examples of expressive experimentation to be found in the homepage universe. They are quite simply a boon to readers. As one diarist put it, "Anyone can stop by and get a good story - for free - anytime they want."

The diarists themselves, simply by continuing to write, are putting their own indelible stamp on the Web and perhaps on our era's social history as well. For where else will future generations find such numerous, accessible accounts of, in historian/memoirist Paul Fussell's phrase, "experience, sheer vulgar experience?"

Yet the online diary remains something of a conundrum - an oddity, as I called it in the opening sentence of this piece. It is a genre for which even its best practictioners feel a bemused ambivalence:

Please return next Monday for comments from experts on these survey results.