In my youth, I would make fun of the other girls wasting their time with dolls and diaries. Some had stickers collections, pristinely kept in albums never to be touched – I would stick stickers to whatever was in front of me, in fact, I would rarely buy any as it seemed like a waste of money (put it in an album and do nothing with it?). Everything seemed like a waste of time for me, I wanted to play and run and move. But it was the diary that seemed particularly wasteful to me. As much as I was averse to this idea, I was very introspective. I knew what was going on around me and how I felt about things (I was such a know-it-all!), but there was no motivation to record it permanently. Diaries were a risk too – others could steal them and read what was basically my mind, so I preferred to keep it all up where it couldn’t be touched – where it was mine.
Maaaaany years later blogs came around. I have started blogs left and right and have not consistently kept them (neither consistently posting on them nor consistently talking about any given topic) – this one included. I wonder if it’s because I never kept a diary. And perhaps it’s because I perceive the blog as just an electronic diary – and I’m wired to dislike that concept.
At the same time, when I think of blogs, or when I’m asked to think about the role of blogs (all of its permutations – text, photos, video, txt) I think of self-expression, community and participation. It’s a very different perspective from just a method to keep permanent records. That has changed my overall perception – diaries, like blogs, have little to do with keeping track or making a permanent record, but much more about self-expression in the sense that the exercise of registering something allows you to think and be critical about it. Perhaps that gap in diary writing in my youth makes self-expression particularly difficult for me.
Sidenote: I love writing, which is incongruent to disliking blogging per se. People have praised my writing in the weirdest contexts (from formal emails, to requirements documents, to traffic accident reports, to essays). More interestingly, I get more feedback about writing in English than I do writing in my native language, Portuguese. But I can’t seem to be driven to write on a blog.
For the past month I’ve been using Twitter and it has been revealing in a number of different ways. First, it is very public, which messes with my comfort zone, but it is also very constrained (what are you doing? – under 140 charaters). I think the combination has helped me get over some of my blogging aversion. Looking at the log now, I posted 242 updates in the 30 days I’ve been active. Even though the input is minimal, the frequency of engagement and level of personal information I put into it is overwhelmingly different from what I have shared online in the past.
It has gotten me closer to friends that are often distant (not just physically), even people I wish I communicated with more often but had no good reason to, and it has also been surprising in that what I learn by observing my twittering habits. From my posts I seem to like to talk a great deal about what I’m eating, or how I’d like to be eating and what’s on TV. If you had asked me I would never tell you that about myself.
I also commemorate little things, almost like a high-five to self. Doing that on twitter now, I get the high-five back from peeps in the network. It’s very exciting. Even commiserating over the crappy weather or the quality of a movie with other people makes this more exciting and engaging than anything I’ve tried before.
In Twitter I now have a quasi-diary. Its dynamism (within constraints and interactions methods) and social push have allowed me to overcome the repulse I had for the idea of “Dear Diary”, or the tainted image I have in my head of a pink tome with a padlock and key that would take me away from wanting to play and run and move.
