An increasing number of Rinkies seem to have online journals, such as LiveJournal or similar. I'm not the sort of person who would ever do this, so I'm curious about what people personally feel they get from it.

Online diaries appear to be the most extreme possible way of revealing your private self to total strangers online. It seems to go far beyond posting opinions on a public forum. One of the most fundamental features of writing a diary has always been that it's private: it's a place you write the things you would never say, even to your most intimate friends. And now here goes the whole world transferring this concept into a format which effectively pastes those things onto a huge global billboard.

I really don't understand this. On the one hand, it seems incredibly vain to assume that a log of my daily thoughts, trivial activities (what CD I'm listening to, even!) and general mood would be of interest to anybody else. Let alone people who don't even know who I *am*. On the other hand, if you're writing a journal solely for your own benefit, why not just use Word or a traditional paper diary? It's a strange combination of exhibitionism and introspection.

It occurs to me that this is the next natural development from personal home pages. The Internet isn't human, it doesn't have a personality, and using it precludes the face-to-face human contact we're designed to expect in social interaction. People seem to need a way to yell "I'm me!" in that great big faceless expanse, and they want to be recognised as somebody special and unique. Hence personal home pages, and now that everybody has one of *those*, it's not enough anymore.

Reading online journals is another topic again. I've heard there are people who get addicted to reading other people's journals. Recently I was reading Samuel Pepys' diary -- this is what got me thinking about the whole topic. Now, I have to ask myself, if Samuel Pepys was alive RIGHT NOW and was writing the EXACT SAME diary in LiveJournal day by day (I know, I know. Just pretend, OK?) would I still be interested in reading it? And I think the answer would be no. It would be *creepy*. I'd feel like I was invading his privacy. Heck, I still feel that way reading a widely published version of a diary he wrote centuries ago, and a lot of the stuff he wrote was pretty much just the 1660s version of what mood he was in and what CD he was listening to.

I'm not sure if reading/writing public diaries is some strange form of voyeurism or narcissism or whatever it is that makes shows like Big Brother so popular. Someone enlighten me.