Online diaries

One of the best ways to get a better understanding of others is to read online-diaries and blogs focusing on the authors’ personal lives. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in developing this understanding.

The insights that can be drawn are considerable, e.g. by giving an understanding of others thinking and emotions, indirectly observing human behaviour, learning from the errors of others, ... (For some of the more obvious examples, see my discussion of women and online diaries.) This applies already to the reasonably normal majority, in particular when looking at those written by people of the opposite sex, from other cultures or age groups, and similar. In addition there is a large minority of diaries that show such freakish behaviour, lack of intelligence, or are otherwise absurd, that reading them is tantamount to looking into world that has as little to do with mine as does Narnia. (In fact, I regularly find myself doubting their veracity, e.g. “This must someone deliberately posing with an exaggerated stereotype of [x].”, and only the low probability that so many diaries could be fake keeps me believing them.)

For these purposes, I typically use http://www.opendiary.com/^e—a provider of online diaries and blogs, with a with a very large number of diaries. I often use the “random” function, see if the entry displayed is promising, and if so investigate the diary closer (if not, I just click random again).

I do some diarying and blogging too, as discussed in my category with blog entries.

For those contemplating printed diaries: I can from my own readings recommend Anne Frank’s Diary^w. Samuel Pepys’^w does allow for some insights into the workings of society, intrigue, and similar (and is obviously interesting to the historian); however, does so with low density and only indirectly—it mostly consists of boring descriptions of what Pepys did when, where, and with whom.