Dear diary, how I yearn to be dazzling

"A diary is, at least in theory, a private affair, using non-publication as an enabling factor in reaching for the difficult truth. But so many of the cyberspace "journals" are just downright silly: they are often much more conventional and more thoughtless than what would be allowed to appear in the professional media - more dull as opposed to more free -and this is the greatest surprise about the new technology.

The heads of independent schools are this week struggling with a new hazard in the classroom. Pupils at Fettes are to be found on YouTube cavorting around swigging from a bottle of whisky and being pelted with wet loo paper. Another site shows pupils said to be from Tonbridge, a boys' school in Kent, cavorting with a stripper. Some of these pupils are obviously keen on recording their extra-curricular activities for posterity, but writing them into a jotter will not suffice nowadays: these scruffs have to film their activities on mobile phones and display them on the web.

You have to wonder at the hunger for publicity. A prank is a prank, but why must it be put up for display in the homes of everybody in the world? The whole point of illicit activity (especially when one was a schoolboy) was that it was a secret best kept by a tiny minority of one's chums. A large premium was put on the mechanics of secrecy and of not getting caught.

But now everyone wants his own show. Schoolboys at Gordonstoun want to be seen, for the benefit of their own little egos, writhing on the ground covered in foam.

Once upon a time, the event might have been funny enough to make one split one's sides laughing (though I'm not sure), but nowadays the antics can be thought funny only if millions of people see them.

It is the modern lust for publicity that killed the diary, but so did gigantism. Everybody now wants to be somebody big in the public eye, as if that itself could justify one's existence and make it worthwhile being alive. Of course, many traditional diary-writers wrote in a way that makes it obvious they one day expected to be read. But that's a different matter; "one day" doesn't exist in the minds of British people in the way it once did.

The idea is now to abase oneself as quickly and publicly as possible for immediate impact. What would the point be in storing anything up?.."

" Dear diary, how I yearn to be dazzling"
By Andrew O'Hagan

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Artwork: "The Diary" by Migdalia Arellano
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Comments

[Stephen]

There's an interesting line in here -
"The whole point of illicit activity (especially when one was a schoolboy) was that it was a secret best kept by a tiny minority of one's chums. A large premium was put on the mechanics of secrecy and of not getting caught."

What is the new secrecy?
And will this lead us to where the new elite are?

Stephen