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AUTOBLOGRAPHY
Diarists are exposing themselves on the web, giving whole new meaning to the word "shameless."

Text: CLIVE THOMPSON

LATELY, I'VE BEEN SNOOPING AROUND IN PEOPLE'S DIARIES AND IT'S LIKE WATCHING A CAR CRASH IN SLOW MOTION. A diarist named Joel chronicles the bleak landscape of his Dilbert-like job, documenting his lurch toward getting fired for incompetence. ("I am the biggest loser I’ve ever met," he moans.) Another admits she is having an affair – and hasn’t told her husband.

I suppose I ought to feel more embarrassed about rummaging around in people’s private lives. But the thing is, I haven’t stolen their diaries from under their mattresses. These authors put their journals on-line and invite the whole world to stop by and read.

Blogs (short for "Web logs") are a booming new on-line trend: confessional Websites that are updated at least daily. They look pretty much like a page with text and pictures, but they’re amazingly personal.

In one sense, bloggers neatly invert George Orwell’s deepest fears about technological society. Instead of worrying about Big Brother watching, they turn the camera on themselves. We spent the first half of the Internet revolution fretting about our privacy; now bloggers actively shun it. More than a million people run blogs, with each one getting anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand viewers per day.

"I’m pretty amazed at how this has just exploded," marvels Andrew Smales, the Toronto-based founder of Diaryland (www.diaryland.com), a free on-line tool that helps people create blogs. Anyone can sign up for an account, and the Diaryland engine instantly creates a blog for you with your own URL that you can hand out to anyone who wants to read all about you.

Is your boss ticking you off? Have you found a really weird on-line animation? Click and write about it. The Diaryland site keeps an updated list of which blogs have most recently been updated, so that curious passersby can peruse the most active writers; and blogs usually have forums where readers enthusiastically – or sardonically – comment on the lives of the bloggers.

Part of blogging’s appeal is the sheer ease of use. "People like the idea that something can occur to them and in 10 seconds they’ve shared it with the world," muses Smales. Other blogging tools like Blogger (www.blogger.com) and LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) have joined in, and all have been growing at explosive rates thanks to word-of-mouth alone. Diaryland has gained more than 350,000 users without Smales spending a penny on advertising.

While they mark a genuine shift in the on-line world, blogs are also about a deeper cultural shift. They show how our important experiences are increasingly taking place on-line. Bloggers often litter their postings with links to other sites, exhaustively noting every place they’ve visited on-line with running commentary. They essentially treat cyberspace as our new shared landscape.

"I live on-line all day long, so that’s as much a part of my life as walking down the street," says Toronto native Cory Doctorow, who runs a popular blog called Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net), where he collects fascinating links to everything from transcripts of Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitic ravings to pictures of "way-kewl" cellphones that take video pictures. Doctorow figures that link-spotting is part of how the bloggers help Internet users make sense of the enormous mass experience of the Net.

Bloggers are notorious for using links in witty, ironic ways, such as taking a word in a sentence and linking it to something that turns it into a clever in-joke. The founders of a proto-blog (www.suck.com) used to link the word "sellout" back to their own site. Maura Johnson, a 26-year-old who’s been blogging for years (www.maura.com), frequently links one word in her daily journal to a previous entry deep in the past, elegantly reflecting the way memory interweaves one experience with another. "It’s like a whole new style of prose that isn’t really possible on the printed page," she explains.

Still, the highly confessional side of blogs rankles some people, including many critics who dismiss the whole trend as unbridled narcissism. Last winter, prominent PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak wrote a column soundly panning blogs for being "uninteresting and uninspired" and filled with "blatant exhibitionism and obvious self-indulgence."

Bloggers angrily swarmed on-line to post counter-screeds. Dvorak, they argued, was missing the whole point. Blogs aren’t about producing polished glossy bits of media like magazine articles or book chapters. They’re more like punk rock. It’s about the experience of doing it. In that sense, they’re more like therapy or self-discovery (which is no doubt what galls observers).

When Brad Fitzpatrick originally launched LiveJournal, he was stunned to see mild-mannered friends flower into on-line exhibitionists. "It’s so strange. People won’t discuss anything in real life; they just talk about day-to-day crap," he says. "Then they go home and post their deepest, innermost feelings onto their journal. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde." The same vibe has fuelled the webcam movement, where netizens – like the infamous Jenni (www.jennicam.com) – broadcast pictures of every waking hour of their lives.

This is more than just wearing your heart on your Web page, though. Bloggers say the trend is also about community. Blogs frequently develop small but freakishly intense fan bases, linking to one another, reading each other’s sites and forming incredibly tight networks. One prolific 23-year-old blogger named Anna says she’s travelled as far as Chicago and Britain to meet with other Diaryland diarists. Visitors to her site (ladieland.diaryland.com) comment on her life, offering advice. And responses are, indeed, a central part of a blog’s content; readers aren’t merely reading dead text, but participating in a multi-layered dialogue. In the blog world, you don’t just read someone’s diary, you get to be in it. "I get teenage girls e-mailing me for advice. They’re asking about love, sex, their boyfriends – they want to know what to do about life," Anna marvels. "It’s so weird because I’m 23! They say, ‘Oh, you’re my role model.’ I’m like, are you even reading what I’m writing on my site? You’re not supposed to behave like me!"

Will blogging fade out like so many trends? Many observers argue it won’t. Bloggers tend to be younger and Web-savvy. "They’ve never known any world without the Internet," says Evan Williams, the programmer who founded Blogger. "They think this is as normal as breathing the air." He figures blogs will eventually transcend their "trend" status to become the norm – a typical way we use the Web to share our thoughts and experiences.

It’s an intriguing – if slightly scary – thought. Like Socrates said, the unexamined life isn’t worth living. But he never imagined this.

BLOG ON:
www.diaryland.com
www.blogger.com
www.livejournal.com
www.boingboing.net
www.suck.com
www.maura.com
www.jennicam.com
ladieland.diaryland.com