Online Diaries: Transformation of Medium and Meaning - Exploring Meaning

In her book Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles writes, “Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal constructions. Literary texts, like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that their materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven” (Hayles, 107). As Hayles emphasizes numerous times, the form or material of a text is critically important to its meaning. Applying this sentence to the diaries, which have shifted from print form to an online medium, would imply that the meaning, use, and purpose of diaries have radically changed as they entered and expand in the online world. Through studying the history of diaries and the reflections of the first online diarists, however, it appears that the current, public form of blogs has not changed the basic purpose of journals but instead added beneficial aspects to diaries, the most important on which is the formation of communities.

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