by Andrew Beck

Created on: November 29, 2010   Last Updated: November 30, 2010

Ok, so we have all experienced being on the internet or out on the street carrying our phones, when something ticks and agitates us, or something may please us, but we feel that we have to record the moment. Now, we all have memories, but unfortunately they can fail us sometimes. So you want to write it down, giving you two options. The first option that most people would think of is going on your phone, and then signing into Facebook or Blogger. These are ways of writing down what happened, yes, but this leaves your personal experience and thoughts open to judgment by all of those people who view. What people fail to realize from time to time, is that if you post on a blog or social networking site, it is as if it is for the internet public explicitly, and the level of the word “personal” just gets sucked right out of it, and it then gets tailored to the site that’s been used.

The second option that people would pick is to write it down in a journal or diary, journal being the key word here. Journals are much more personal than any website going. It is a hard copy of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences which are meant only for you and whomever you wish to share that with. It is a place where you can feel free to say whatever will spring into your mind, where you can emit every negative and positive piece of information in your head. There are restrictions that do not exist when you are writing in a journal as they would on public blogging or social networking sites. In a way, it can be said that this will not change for many years to come. People’s lives are too personal to be shared with everybody, though some have started to do so through the internet.

Journals are that best friend we all need (metaphorically speaking of course), as they will always listen to whatever we have to say and help us to make sense of it all in solid writing, and it will not share the information with anybody else. Sure, we all have best friends who we can speak to about life’s problems, but they aren’t always equipped to deal with it in the way that a journal can. People have emotions and fatigue, they have their own burdens to cope with, be them internal or external. That is a small part of the reason why journals are much more effective. If you were to write an online journal or blog for everybody to see, you are then open to very uneducated prejudice on the matter, which in turn can completely tip your balance of realistic and logical thought.

Now, there are some drawbacks to writing in journals that can’t be ignored either. These downfalls are as simple as the restrictions that come with owning a journal. Journals are as private as you make them, but they are meant for you to be able to enter anything whatsoever that is on your mind, free of interference of other people’s naive feedback. The question is, however, what happens if you want opinions on what you are writing about? You would then either have to recite the entry or show them the entry. This will completely breach one of the main reasons you would use a journal. Being quite a risk, it can sometimes be better to tailor the entry after writing it, and then post it to blogger or facebook etc.

The conclusive point of all this, however, is that journals are a personal outlet which people can use freely as they wish and when they wish. They can record their deepest and darkest secrets, as well as every single thought and feeling they have, something you cannot do with other media.

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