Online Diaries: Transformation of Medium and Meaning - Private or Public: Always Performed

"What is it about diaries, I wonder? You can't be honest in them—these pages are one long succession of poses of one kind or another—and if you were honest I don't know whether it would be much better. It's a strange kind of conceit that makes a totally unimportant person want to record for posterity." -- Yvonne Blue, a teenage diarist from the mid-1900’s (Schrum, 118)

I post this quote to call into question whether, in both the private form of the twentieth century and the public form of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and today, diaries ever truly contain “honest” information about their scribe. No matter the presence of an audience or not, according to numerous critics, writing always involves “creating” a self. As Jane Greer says, both private and public diaries are “highly performative and are composed in complex cultural contexts that both enable and constrain what can be read and written" (Greer, 300). Both readers and writers of diaries must keep in mind how performative they are, and Kelly Schrum reiterates that diaries “are productions rather than unmediated reflections of life" (Schrum, 116-117). Walter Ong extends this creative aspect to all writing, such as fiction, memoirs, letter writing, and diaries. He believes that writing is a solipsistic exercise that involves creating a fictional audience (Ong, 100), and he thinks this is especially true for personal diaries:

“Even in a personal diary addressed to myself I must fictionalize the addressee. Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself. But I never really talk this way to myself. Nor could I without writing or without print” (Ong, 101).

Thus, in a sense, writing in a diary is the most performative writing one can do, for it requires fictionalizing oneself, which wouldn’t be possible without the act of writing. It is because writing is always performative, always a production, and always “imitation talking”, whether one is seemingly writing for oneself or for others, that the transfer of diaries from the private sphere to a public sphere does not drastically change what is written.

In “The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature,” Steve Himmer shifts this discussion of the fictionalizing of diaries to blogs. He says that it’s important not to think that “the self presented on a weblog is a ‘complete’ or even an accurate one: just as in journalism, memoir, or fiction, decisions are made about what to include and what to exclude. The weblogger, in that sense, can be read as fictional, as a character, in precisely the same ways that Andy Rooney or James Joyce can be—furthering the collapse between factual and fictional, public and private, and distinct genres in general” (Himmer).  In attempting to document themselves through writing about their daily actions, feelings, and opinions, webloggers actually create characters. Like any diary, personal blogs are performative and fictional, so the shift of diaries to an online medium is simply another extension of this “collapse” of both factual and fictional, private and public that was already present in early diaries.

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