Keeping with the ‘past futures’ theme of a previous post, this is a link to the Online Diary History Project. The project collects written accounts by the pioneers in online journaling, who are asked to look back on their work. Why did they write? How did the various diarists come to form a community? Lurking behind these questions, at least for me, is how the blog form emerged out of (or perhaps in spite of) these personal pages.
I’ve only just started looking through the archive, but some interesting things are popping up. Carolyn Burke, who has republished her diary in full, describes her motivation for making the private self something public (and of course the usually neglected converse, turning the public Internet into something personal):
I believed strongly in the power of good that results from free expression, free information exchange, and open and honest communication between people. I’d been studying Popper and Fyerabend in university, about creating an open society as one aspect in the pursuit of better quality knowledge.
An online diary, a place that exposed private mental spaces to everyones’ scrutiny seemed like a social obligation to me. (source)
I won’t go into why I think this is so important - these are ideas I’m still working out - but the kind of resource the Diary History project provides is really helpful. So if anyone is aware of comparable work being done, i.e. exceptional efforts to document the practices of pre-1999 online diarists, please let me know!