Personal Writing: An Online Culture Encouraging Self-Expression

I’ve already expressed my interest for the social media site Tumblr. The great thing about it is that people can express themselves in anyway they want by blogging. I use my Tumblr blog mostly for writing, creative, personal writing. Self-expression. In my Love and Marriage class, my professor and I were discussing how self-expression was a rare happening in the Renaissance, especially for women. We read a diary entry called “The birthe of all my children” by Frances Matthew. She had six entries, each detailing the birth date and death date of each of her six children. Each entry illustrated the time of the child’s birth, the people present at the birth, and then the time of death – it was not uncommon for children to die soon after birth, looking back at the medical advancements of the time. She expressed no sentiment, even in her own personal diary, the purpose of a diary being the most secret and expressive place to write about whatever one wants. We talked in class about how different people are today from then. When I was younger, for example, I had diaries I wrote in every day. (Shamefully I admit this, for my entries were childish, going along the lines of “Mary was SO mad at me today, oh my gosh!” and “LOL Ian is so cute xoxo smiley face kiss kiss.” Needless to say I destroyed the evidence.) But then there is the internet. The beautiful thing about Tumblr, and many other social media sites, is that you need not give your identity if you don’t want to. You come up with a username, and that’s essentially all you need to start blogging. Many people express themselves freely, not having to worry about social convention or fitting in, because nobody really knows or cares who you are anyway. Writing is a way to vent, to lament, to express. And on the internet you can share your feelings with people, people who sometimes feel the same way and respond to you because of your writing. Here is one of my personal writing pieces, an observation I made one day: “If you spend too much time trapped in your own head, you start to lose sense of what is real and what is not, of what is morally right and morally wrong, of what it is to feel the comfort of another person’s hand or lips on your cheek. You lose sense of yourself, in a way, because people are molded by their peers, their surroundings. And if you are alone, who will help you become something? No one – that is the answer. No one will make you into a human being, decent or indecent; you will simply be a collection of gears and cogs and whirligigs, destined to either keep ticking or fold in on yourself until you are nothing but a pile of dust and rusty metal and the clockmaker has to come in and clean your mess off his desk so he can start from scratch.” I like the fact that I have a place to go to write what I feel, to use self-expression in my writing. People say the internet had destroyed contemporary writing. I don’t think that’s true. I agree it has changed the style of writing, yes, and sometimes not for the better. But the internet, sites like Tumblr, are open, mostly friendly places where people of all shapes and sizes, people with all sorts of feelings and all sorts of writing styles, can freely express themselves. And that, in of itself, is a beautiful thing.