The wonderful wide Web’s livejournals and blogs

I love the Internet. My favorite part of cyberspace is undoubtedly the personal journals and… I love the Internet. My favorite part of cyberspace is undoubtedly the personal journals and logs where the average Dick or Jane – even the above-average Pitt News columnist – can record his life, complete with his every thought and opinion.

When I was in high school, the big site for this was livejournal.com, but we are now in the golden era of the online diary. Alongside livejournal, we have a bunch of livejournal alternatives like Xanga, Web log sites like Blogspot and Typepad, and the ever-entertaining myspace. Arun doesn’t actually know which site came first because he doesn’t care.

Fortunately, this trend has taken off and populated the Web with thousands upon thousands of potential targets for my laughter and general feelings of superiority. With a couple of clicks and a few depressed keystrokes, we can publish whatever we feel like.

Apparently, we feel miserable. I’m not sure what it is about online diaries, but don’t they all seem so sad?

The regular posting of the day’s banal minutiae is not what I look for when I go lurking about livejournals. What I hunt for are the journals that pretend no one else can read them but the author. These journals are steeped in drama and personal problems that the author is putting out there as though the chronicle is underneath his bed, secured by a heart-shaped padlock.

The depressed posts oftentimes yield perversely interesting poetry. They are interesting not for their place in the greater corpus of English literature, but because with every tortured word dripping with existential angst learned after reading Kafka for school, I can breathe easier. Livejournal poetry makes me feel safe in the knowledge that there are a lot of people whom I am identifiably better than; I may not write poetry, but I know that if I did, it would be so much better.

The most fun is attempting to recreate the personal drama in the author’s life and assessing what is genuine reflection and what is a passive-aggressive insult to that moody ex-best friend who refuses to admit that the vinyl Simple Plan LP I let her borrow was scratched after I dropped it off at her place.

Then, usually on Saturday nights when I can finally be alone with my thoughts, I piece together from the ex-best friend’s journal and his mutual friends the full puzzle. Once I have gotten a good laugh at the current set of losers, I go on to the next random journal and begin anew. It’s an itch with a never-ending supply of fixes.

Seeing how everyone and – regrettably – his mom has a Web journal, there is a high likelihood that the public and elected figure of tomorrow is the green-haired, tortured soul sitting in front of his computer today. I wonder if livejournals and Web logs will find their way into the source material of future biographers:

“Despite the 55th president’s comfortable upbringing, the black-on-red background and suicidal, free-verse, ellipses-sodden ruminations reveal depressed and bitter innards. It is a testament to his personal strength and conviction that he somehow survived his teenage years. It is noteworthy that he ceased updating regularly after his 17th birthday. Perhaps it was the slightly used 2012 Tercel – with killer surround-o-vision and huge back seat, lol – that can be thanked for preserving Dear Leader.”

Part of me hopes that one day “lol” will appear at least once in every scholarly work. But another, saner part is of the opinion that should the online journal continue to flourish, it will become a valuable primary source to the collective history of man.

The next Howard Zinn won’t have to slave away in poorly ventilated archive rooms searching for source documents of a new people’s history. He’ll be able to Google it, copy and paste the relevant bits, post them on his blog and order pizza in the time it takes his illegal download to finish.

We are on the cusp of an exciting new era. We will have more information than we know what to do with. Luckily, no one will use this to abuse the anonymity and overabundance of information to obfuscate important information, ideas and events, or to shape history to fit a preset narrative that glorifies one ideology while demonizing another. Who would dare defile the hallowed halls of the Internet?

Arun defiles said halls on a thrice-daily basis. E-mail him at arunbutcher@gmail.com.