| In an effort to understand how the Internet serves as a social infrastructure for many of its users, this study focused on the growing contingent of online diarists who use the public medium of the Internet to record their private thoughts and behaviors. Online diarists began appearing as individuals in 1995 and now constitute a group that numbers well over five thousand, with many more thousands of participants who read, witness, and respond to online diarists entries in a virtual community. Online journalers are engaged in a movement to create dynamic, noncommercial, and experimental content for the Internet. This study of the online journal phenomenon chronicled how creative people have used personal diaries since 1995 to create online selves and communities.; During two years of online research (1999–2001) in the online journal communities, including extensive interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis, data revealed that these communities engender connection and experiential realities, indeed the experience of community. Journalers build relationships within the community, and structure the larger collectivity itself, by writing and sharing autobiographical narratives, the currency of exchange. Online journal communities serve, first, as proof that online communities are important sites of self and relationship making, and, second, as a base for further study on how meaningful communities are shaped and maintained. The results of this study suggest that, at its most essential level, the union of shared interest coupled with opportunities for human connection create and enliven the online community. The existence of online diarists problematizes notions of privacy, self-expression, and individualism. The individual identity projects of online diarists, understood as an interconnected group, suggest an emerging techno-social community that alters or replaces features of community life in America today. |
