Dear Diary,
I used to write in you each night before going to bed. You were like a best friend forever except you'd never talk behind my back or give out my locker combination. On your pages, I recorded my deepest secrets for posterity, or at least until I broke up with my current boyfriend. (At which point, Dear Diary, I burned you to obliterate those memories forever. Thanks for forgiving me.)
Like all diaries, you came equipped with highly secure miniature lock and key, to keep little brothers or sisters (or moms) from peeking at you. My words on your pages belonged to you and me alone. No one would consider letting anyone - not even a human BFF - read her diary. That's because you, Dear Diary, were private. It even said so on your cover.
I'm sure diaries still exist, but you are on the endangered species list. You've succumbed to the fate feared by humans and diaries alike. You've been replaced - by modern technology and a new philosophy regarding information distribution.
Blogs, photo uploads, video posting and social networking sites do the work you used to do - and they're on the job 24/7. More than ever before, people are sharing personal information like it's nobody's business, which it isn't, but it is.
The plethora of choices and information are like diary diarrhea, but I digress in pursuit of alliteration. Forgive me again. Sometimes I can't help myself, but you already knew that.
Dear Diary, the concept of you has morphed from a private journal meant for my eyes and your pages only into a public, on the record, in the cloud, nonflammable digital account for the whole World Wide Web to peruse at will - forever.
It almost sounds scary. When I examine the numbers, the scare factor multiplies. Consider this: Snapchat users send more than 700 million photos and videos each day. To put things in perspective, the population of the United States is around 320 million. Back in 2012, YouTube had 4 billion daily video views, which would equate to each person in the U.S. watching more than 12 YouTube videos a day. (Of course people outside the U.S. utilize YouTube, but you get my gist.) Facebook reports more than a billion monthly users, Twitter a half a billion daily tweets. Vine is used by 23 percent of U.S. teens, who loop more than a billion videos a day. Tumblr hosts more than 200 million blogs, and it's just one of 92 blog hosting choices listed on Wikipedia.
We're posting and sharing and streaming and linking and looping and uploading as fast as our 4G or high speed broadband will let us. Gives a completely new meaning to the term information overload.
Dear Diary, you were a private entity, back when popular was something that happened at school, not online. You might be surprised to learn we now define our popularity by the number of views we get to a comment or blog or photo, which are all basically variations of you. Can you imagine providing hundreds or thousands of people unlimited access to your pages? I bet you never thought you'd see that happen.
Neither did I, but I confess I am a part of the system. I celebrate when I get 83 likes to my new profile picture and feel guilty when I haven't tweeted as often as I should.
Still, there's something to be said for the good old days when a profile was an outline cut out of black cardboard and status referred to your social standing. A vine spanned 6 feet, not 6 seconds, and grew in your garden, not online; a cloud brought rain and blog would have been a typo. My kids will never know you in your purest sense. They are growing up in a very public, very selfie world and that makes me a little sad.
Even though I do most of my writing at a computer (by the way, the new word for typewriter is keyboard) I haven't forgotten you and the fun we used to have. Don't tell anyone - I know you won't - but I often take a notebook and pen and put my thoughts to paper the old-fashioned way. When I do, I think of you and remember our good times. And I miss you, Dear Diary. Sometimes I really do.
- Jill Pertler's column appears every Thursday in the Times. She can be reached at pertmn@qwest.net.
I used to write in you each night before going to bed. You were like a best friend forever except you'd never talk behind my back or give out my locker combination. On your pages, I recorded my deepest secrets for posterity, or at least until I broke up with my current boyfriend. (At which point, Dear Diary, I burned you to obliterate those memories forever. Thanks for forgiving me.)
Like all diaries, you came equipped with highly secure miniature lock and key, to keep little brothers or sisters (or moms) from peeking at you. My words on your pages belonged to you and me alone. No one would consider letting anyone - not even a human BFF - read her diary. That's because you, Dear Diary, were private. It even said so on your cover.
I'm sure diaries still exist, but you are on the endangered species list. You've succumbed to the fate feared by humans and diaries alike. You've been replaced - by modern technology and a new philosophy regarding information distribution.
Blogs, photo uploads, video posting and social networking sites do the work you used to do - and they're on the job 24/7. More than ever before, people are sharing personal information like it's nobody's business, which it isn't, but it is.
The plethora of choices and information are like diary diarrhea, but I digress in pursuit of alliteration. Forgive me again. Sometimes I can't help myself, but you already knew that.
Dear Diary, the concept of you has morphed from a private journal meant for my eyes and your pages only into a public, on the record, in the cloud, nonflammable digital account for the whole World Wide Web to peruse at will - forever.
It almost sounds scary. When I examine the numbers, the scare factor multiplies. Consider this: Snapchat users send more than 700 million photos and videos each day. To put things in perspective, the population of the United States is around 320 million. Back in 2012, YouTube had 4 billion daily video views, which would equate to each person in the U.S. watching more than 12 YouTube videos a day. (Of course people outside the U.S. utilize YouTube, but you get my gist.) Facebook reports more than a billion monthly users, Twitter a half a billion daily tweets. Vine is used by 23 percent of U.S. teens, who loop more than a billion videos a day. Tumblr hosts more than 200 million blogs, and it's just one of 92 blog hosting choices listed on Wikipedia.
We're posting and sharing and streaming and linking and looping and uploading as fast as our 4G or high speed broadband will let us. Gives a completely new meaning to the term information overload.
Dear Diary, you were a private entity, back when popular was something that happened at school, not online. You might be surprised to learn we now define our popularity by the number of views we get to a comment or blog or photo, which are all basically variations of you. Can you imagine providing hundreds or thousands of people unlimited access to your pages? I bet you never thought you'd see that happen.
Neither did I, but I confess I am a part of the system. I celebrate when I get 83 likes to my new profile picture and feel guilty when I haven't tweeted as often as I should.
Still, there's something to be said for the good old days when a profile was an outline cut out of black cardboard and status referred to your social standing. A vine spanned 6 feet, not 6 seconds, and grew in your garden, not online; a cloud brought rain and blog would have been a typo. My kids will never know you in your purest sense. They are growing up in a very public, very selfie world and that makes me a little sad.
Even though I do most of my writing at a computer (by the way, the new word for typewriter is keyboard) I haven't forgotten you and the fun we used to have. Don't tell anyone - I know you won't - but I often take a notebook and pen and put my thoughts to paper the old-fashioned way. When I do, I think of you and remember our good times. And I miss you, Dear Diary. Sometimes I really do.
- Jill Pertler's column appears every Thursday in the Times. She can be reached at pertmn@qwest.net.
