There are memories that I could associate myself with, even before reading my diary but some of them I particularly or even deliberately erased from my brain. I think of my diary book as an external organ that holds information of my past. If I lose my diary book, it would feel as though I lose some parts of my life.
My childhood dairy holds my identity in a chronological order. I am actually very reluctant to show this to other people. It's a very private thing.
Even as a child I was concerned about privacy of my thoughts. Although my diary had a lock, I used aliases for the people that I fell in love with. I knew that my parents did not have the capacity to tolerate my love to other men. So I came up with women's names that I used among my friends when referring to men. When I read my diary this time, I realized that I could not recognize some of these aliases. I even called my friends to figure out whom I had such strong feelings for. But they seemed to have forgotten long before me. When I turned Fifteen, I developed a code language to write about the things that had to be inaccessible forever from everyone. My code language consisted of symbols and lines that were not found on keyboards. At the time it didn't occur to me that one day I might want to keep my diaries online.
I sometimes wonder how things would be if I were a teenager today. Would I write everything on a blog? How could I deal with the issue of privacy in computation? And how would I develop a code language that was inaccessible to everyone? I wonder how it is for the youth today. How much of the youth online dairies contain unforgivable lies about themselves? How much they have to pretend to be someone they are not?
Digital media technology has made it possible for teens to share more about themselves to more people than ever before. It has also made it harder for teens to control what personal information gets shared with others. Today, it is more likely to find lies and unreal news on people's blog. The simple reason is that we are expected to protect ourselves.
The shift from a private communication channel such as my journal and the public space of the blog have very large implications for the process by which contemporary youth construct their identities. And in the end, as Henry Jenkins pointed out to me, one wonders whether using a code in a diary to protect your secrets is the same as constructing fictions in a blog to mask aspects of your life.
In her article, Why Youth Love Social Network Sites, danah boyd defines an invisible audience online:
* boyd, danah. Why Youth Love Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. University of California, Berkeley, School of information
