The school I went to for undergraduate - Bryn Mawr College - is infamous (in a minor way) for its 'Back-Smoker Diaries.' Most of the dorms have a small lounge area still called the 'back-smoker,' even though of course they've been non-smoking for a decade or more. While I was there (and I'd be surprised if it hadn't changed at all, but I'd be more surprised if it has changed out of recognition) almost every dorm's back smoker had an on-going public journal.
Everyone used a pseudonym; it was considered a drastic breach of ettiquette to tell anyone who anyone's name was. Most of the people who wrote regularly knew the names/identities of the other frequent writers quite well - but the courtesy of the pseudonym was maintained.
With one exception, the journals were very much the same kind of overlap of public and private journalling that blogging - and the journals described in the link you give - provides. One would come in, drop into a dilapidated, comfy chair, sling one's backpack to the side, pick up the Diary, and, if one was a regular, read everything that had been written since one's last reading, and then make an entry, about classes, love, life, a particular professor obliquely identified, dinner, or what-have-you. Quotations and snippets of poetry were common.
The books might be cheap composition books - bound, though, never spiral or glued: the sheets were not for removal - or solid black hard-covered journals. Every time one was nearly full, someone would take responsibility for buying a new one. The one exception I mentioned above was the Erdman back-smoker diary: for years it was a communally created rambling fantasy novel of ridiculous proportions. But even in Erdman, while I was there, people started up a separate journal-style diary for psuedonym-signed entries about real life - often, in fact, commentary on what was being written in the fictional diary.
The diaries defined communities. By no means were the people who wrote in them exclusively residents of the dorms. Rather, EBS (Erdman back-smoker) collected the fiction-addicted, because of its proximity to Elsinore (the communal, unending novel). Denbigh, while I was there, was politically radical and largely queer, Marion and Rockefeller were much more moderate.... People gravitated toward the journals that suited them, and often wrote regularly in more than one.
I can't, honestly, think of anything in the world more like a paper LJ. It was a while ago, for me, but I find the transition is smooth. I sort of miss changing my pseudonym periodically, and being able to change my pen color and my handwriting for each entry, and occasionally drawing instead of writing at all. On the other hand, Calluna vulgaris was my psuedonym in the Denbigh Back-Smoker Diary for the last few years I was there.
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Date: 2005-08-07 05:42 am (UTC)Everyone used a pseudonym; it was considered a drastic breach of ettiquette to tell anyone who anyone's name was. Most of the people who wrote regularly knew the names/identities of the other frequent writers quite well - but the courtesy of the pseudonym was maintained.
With one exception, the journals were very much the same kind of overlap of public and private journalling that blogging - and the journals described in the link you give - provides. One would come in, drop into a dilapidated, comfy chair, sling one's backpack to the side, pick up the Diary, and, if one was a regular, read everything that had been written since one's last reading, and then make an entry, about classes, love, life, a particular professor obliquely identified, dinner, or what-have-you. Quotations and snippets of poetry were common.
The books might be cheap composition books - bound, though, never spiral or glued: the sheets were not for removal - or solid black hard-covered journals. Every time one was nearly full, someone would take responsibility for buying a new one. The one exception I mentioned above was the Erdman back-smoker diary: for years it was a communally created rambling fantasy novel of ridiculous proportions. But even in Erdman, while I was there, people started up a separate journal-style diary for psuedonym-signed entries about real life - often, in fact, commentary on what was being written in the fictional diary.
The diaries defined communities. By no means were the people who wrote in them exclusively residents of the dorms. Rather, EBS (Erdman back-smoker) collected the fiction-addicted, because of its proximity to Elsinore (the communal, unending novel). Denbigh, while I was there, was politically radical and largely queer, Marion and Rockefeller were much more moderate.... People gravitated toward the journals that suited them, and often wrote regularly in more than one.
I can't, honestly, think of anything in the world more like a paper LJ. It was a while ago, for me, but I find the transition is smooth. I sort of miss changing my pseudonym periodically, and being able to change my pen color and my handwriting for each entry, and occasionally drawing instead of writing at all. On the other hand, Calluna vulgaris was my psuedonym in the Denbigh Back-Smoker Diary for the last few years I was there.