Dear Diary – are you still listening to me?

As a lifetime advocate of journaling, I'm increasingly curious about people's experiences of personal writing in the digital age. We seem to have come from a time in which keeping a diary was done largely for our own reflection and self-understanding. We may have added photographs, sketches and heartfelt poetry, but these pages were our personal treasure to be shared, at best sparingly, with only the right people at the right time. We may have left instructions for our personal jottings to be kept or destroyed after our demise. We also may have been surviving heirs who wondered what to do with them when discovered among the author's affairs.

Now, between selfies and snaps of this morning's breakfast, our social networks are jammed with the intimate and not so intimate details of everyday life. Today, it seems that our personal creations are aimed at being seen, and hopefully liked by others, though, in some cases, they can also be a form of warfare between trolls and their victims or attempts at political persuasion. They can be the lies that we live or want others to live by. Are these somehow seen as a substitute for keeping a diary, the new alternative, or do we consider them something quite different? Why do we do them? Is their maintenance a matter of delusion or deliberate intention?

I would love to hear of the experiences that you are having or have had with personal writing, where you are at with it today if you are still active, as well as about what others of your acquaintance, of any age, may actually be doing with it that they may have shared with you. Do we write or dictate? Do we still take pen and crayons in hand for imaging our everyday experience, or perhaps documenting special events, travels, projects, etc, from our point of view and our feelings about them attempting to be objective observers of our subjective experience?

PS: A number of my books & writings can be downloaded free here.