I have been reading Write in My Journal today. It is a fascinating site and I would recommend it to anyone who has some spare time on their hands, as I do at the moment. I find it an interesting assessment of human nature. The tagline of the site is everyone has a story to tell, the owner of the blog, David, simply goes around armed with his moleskine notebook (good choice) and asks people he meets to write in it. He then uploads their entry to his blog with a little information about where and when he met the person.
This is a very interesting experiment to carry out on people. David says that he often wonders about the people that pass him on the street and wonder what stories they could tell if they had an outlet. David provides that outlet, to some degree. Another interesting factor about David's blog is that he gets the people to write in a notebook by hand. In an era where people can type faster than they can handwrite and often go for days without picking up a pen, there is something very intimate about asking someone you do not know to write something for your blog by hand.
This idea of getting a glimpse into people's lives has got me thinking about several things. Firstly, I am baffled as to what I would write in David's journal if he ever came up to me on the street. If he came up to me on the street in my home town I would probably write rant about my everyday life. Seeing as David states on his blog that he lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, this eventuality seems highly unlikely. Let's say then, for the sake of argument, that I am visiting Salt Lake City and I met David there, what would I write? In all honesty, I would probably gush about how great my holiday/travels have been so far but really that's not much of a glimpse into my personality is it?
I have plenty of interesting experiences and random thoughts swirling around in my head but I somehow think that these are not what would appear on David's page. This realisation in turn was something that got me thinking about how much of a glimpse into our lives we would allow a stranger to get from a chance encounter.
We allow strangers into our lives all the time. I am sure that most of us have met a stranger in a nightclub or a bar or someplace similar and deigned to allow them to kiss us, an act that can be considered incredibly intimate, but we shrink away from letting them see our intimate emotional selves, which is what David is trying to achieve with his blog. It is not just strangers that we shy away from, but I am not getting into the nature of human relationships here, that is for another time. I find it interesting that if a man approached me in the street in the middle of the day and asked for a kiss I would probably run in the opposite direction, but if a man approached and asked me to write for his blog I would probably think "what the hell" and do it. Which is more intimate, the physical intimacy of a kiss or the emotional intimacy of writing about yourself for a stranger?
Another thought that came to me as I was reading entries on this blog was the nature of the internet. There are so many extraordinary stories of people meeting each other on the internet and going on to have amazing experiences with them. Like Kyle McDonald, who traded one red paperclip for a house. OK, so not a direct trade, he traded from a paperclip to a pen and from a pen to a doorknob and from a doorknob to a... well you get the idea. That was a pretty amazing idea, to go from a paperclip to a house in a year and become famous along the way. Of course there are the stories of people who meet online and fall in love and get married. A story we can all relate to. Not all of us are lucky enough to meet our future spouse in a chat room, but I have met some pretty incredible people through social networking sites such as MySpace and I know someone who just married someone they met through the internet 6 years ago.
It appears as though the internet is replacing the message in a bottle as a means of meeting people at random. The message in the bottle may never be discovered or replied to, as was the case with the message I threw into the sea off the North-East coast of England when I was seven years old, but a random friendly message sent on MySpace has more of a chance.
David's blog is an interesting means of becoming intimate with strangers, and making what the narrator of Fight Club called "single serving friends", but isn't this what we are all doing when we set up a MySpace or a Facebook page? Hoping to keep in touch with old friends and make some new, internet friends. The concept is not so far from the message in a bottle after all.
