Are blogs the new diaries?

Spent the day very productively ordering my facebook photos according to location. 

Listened to Azure Ray and Armin Van Buuren's stuff on the state of trance (I wouldn't usually listen to trance but I liked these ones).

I also listened to podcasts of the John Murray Show which is a radio show on RTÉ 1. The postcasts were about diary writing, and it made me think of blogs (because an account of being in the trenches in WW1 does that to people). 

The first paragraph of this entry was not unlike a diary entry, no? And I've seen that kind of thing on many blogs. People write blogs for different reasons. They're going through physical/spiritual/mental journeys. They're recovering from cancer. They write. They draw. 

Really it's either 

1. people hypermanically promoting themselves or 
2. people just talking about their lives

My notebooks do turn into diaries sometimes, admittedly. I'll start a tirade about something or other amid story/book/shopping notes. 

This is all very interesting to me, because I've been worried lately about a minor and rather stupid thing, but nevertheless it's assumed an importance in my mind. 

JG Ballard, original manuscript of Crash

We have such a wealth of documentary material from writers in the past. Diaries, letters, manuscripts edited and reedited and scored out. And now in this virutal age, with writing especially there's going to be very few edited-by-hand texts like that about. You want to delete or alter a line, you can do it immediately in a word processor without having to print anything. 

I have a physical copy of a manuscript here now, and it's being slashed apart by hand. When I'm done do I keep it and lug it around forever along with all the other trash I own or.....what.

In years to come we'll have nothing for the people who will emerge as the shining (literary) lights of my generation, and then nothing from any subsequent generation. Just slick, polished, public-facing writers. We won't really know what they thought or felt or what they loved. 

So maybe blogs will help that? Because it'll be all there for anyone to see. 

Maybe forever, but probably not.