March 28, 2024

Online diaries help to cope with the feeling of unclaimedness, but are fraught with dangers

A girl with a notebook, writing ornate lines about unrequited love in a secluded corner, today is found, perhaps, only in the novels of the XIX century. But the genre of the diary and did not think to die, just today instead of a notebook – a laptop, and instead of a girlfriend with whom you can share girlish secrets, – a friend-tape.

With the advent of new opportunities for personal communication, much has changed, but it is not always clear how good these changes are.

Why do people keep diaries, what opportunities are in LJ and what are the risks that hide, the correspondent of SE explained.

Valuable notes

If you conduct a mini-survey among your friends about the existence of a paper diary in the past (and perhaps even the present one), they will most likely fall into two categories: some will say they never needed such sentiments, others admit that in the process of writing, there really is an element of meditation.

“The diaries have a powerful psychotherapeutic function,” says the psychotherapist, the director of the Anti-Stress Center Maxim Zagoruiko. – Describing emotionally intense experiences, a person gets real relief. In addition, he begins to analyze the actions, and with a long diary, the effect is intensified: day after day describing his condition, a person better understands what to do next. And writing down part of his life and periodically returning to the records, he enhances the sense of value of his life, which he lives, and not someone else. ”

American psychologists conducted the study – two groups of subjects were offered to keep records for 20 days: some wrote about neutral events, others wrote about emotionally charged ones. By the end of the study, it was found that the second group had better indicators of psychological and physical health. An uncomplicated test quite obviously reminds – to pour out emotions is useful. And getting rid of the burden of the acquired emotions in the diary is perhaps even better than the “human” version: it is known that from active lovers complain about an unsettled life, acquaintances flee far away, because they also have enough of their problems.

In the electronic diary, according to the doctor, psychotherapeutic functions are also present. So, complaining about a careless boss or a scandalous mother-in-law, a person gets the opportunity to empathize with people who read it.

At the same time, the sympathizers are much simpler: they are, to some extent, distanced from real events. The writer himself expressing the emotion itself brings relief.

Digital people

Of course, communication over the network has its own specifics. Specialists identify several points, because of which online diaries are now very popular.

1. Presentation of yourself. There is a very common opinion that the blog does not lead from a good life – they say, people do not have enough communication. This is not entirely true, because today LiveJournal is conducted as closed shy persons, and comrades with a million friends who are difficult to suspect in the lack of communication. Therefore, it is worth shifting the emphasis: the writers do not have a lack of communication, but a deficit of some particular type. So, people do not always have the opportunity to express their original, in their opinion, ideas to as wide a circle of people as they would like.

That is why it is believed that people with a certain feeling of unclaimedness start the blog, most of them are young.

2. Training the dialogue. Firstly, writing, as mentioned above, is a very useful thing for structuring the thinking. Secondly, very many people are able to adequately realize their creative needs. Even if a person does not show their records to a large number of people, he still writes for someone. “This is how the human psyche works. It is in itself dialogical: in the process of writing, the person always has an imaginary interlocutor, “explains Maxim Zagoruiko.
By the way, even great writers, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, confessed that their diaries were just an additional field for journalism that was not included in the novels. In other words, the truly private genre of the diary, in fact, was not.

3. Compliance with the way of life. If you have friends for thousands of kilometers and you communicate with them only through electronic means of communication, it would be very foolish to accuse you of preferring a surrogate to true, living communication. As well as the opportunity to get friends’ comments on the story from your life offline, and not quickly, after seeing the whole gamut of emotions on their faces – if you work from 9 to 20 and can not tell them all this personally. In addition, most people who write diaries use them as a means of obtaining operational information and news, and there is no analogue to the electronic method here either.

Underwater rocks

Despite some obvious advantages of a modern diary over its ancient counterpart, he has many opponents. If you do not think about the possible dangers of the diary, it can do a disservice. So, some begin to abound in the records with intimate details, and others – in unpleasant details of the life of their colleagues. Today, such frankness does not cause any questions. There is an explanation: according to the assistant professor of the social work and social anthropology department of the NSTU Irina Skalaban, modern people have sharply reduced intimate space, the public sphere takes more and more places. Therefore today people calmly talk about what it was absolutely inconceivable to say at the time of their parents. Sociologist warns: this does not mean that you can forget about things that can harm you.

If you use the Internet as a communication training, remember that this is the easiest way, but not always the most effective.

It is here that the responsibility for the said is minimal, and the ability to get away from the answer is maximal. Finally, it is virtual communication – the most vicious devourer of time.

And the last: one of the indisputable advantages of virtual diaries is the opportunity to communicate with people who are interesting to you, but with whom you can not cross in everyday life. However, a sense of belonging to like-minded people, proximity to people whose opinion you care about can turn against you. Irina Skalaban warns never to ask about the evaluation of certain events of other people: “You will not notice, when instead of your shortcomings, the interlocutors will start talking about their own. ”Quite a fair comment, especially if you remember why most of us still open the opportunity to read and comment on their records, even when there is an opportunity to do it privately in an electronic diary.

People tend to see the shortcomings and mistakes of others of their own. Criticism, especially tough, in general is rarely objective – and only from the mouth of a very limited number of people who are directly related to you. And most likely the opinion of a hundred “friends”, most of which you do not even know personally, does not belong to this category.

Reading diaries from a computer monitor, we, in fact, use another way of communication, and there is nothing wrong with that. The whole question is – who exactly do we want to convey our thoughts and whether it is worth talking about some things, even in the space of the faceless Internet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *