January 11, 2004, New York Times
By EMILY NUSSBAUM

When M. gets home from school, he immediately logs on to
his computer. Then he stays there, touching base with the
people he has seen all day long, floating in a kind of
multitasking heaven of communication. First, he clicks on
his Web log, or blog -- an online diary he keeps on a Web
site called LiveJournal -- and checks for responses from
his readers. Next he reads his friends' journals,
contributing his distinctive brand of wry, supportive
commentary to their observations. Then he returns to his
own journal to compose his entries: sometimes confessional,
more often dry private jokes or koanlike observations on
life.

Finally, he spends a long time -- sometimes hours --
exchanging instant messages, a form of communication far
more common among teenagers than phone calls. In multiple
dialogue boxes on his computer screen, he'll type real-time
conversations with several friends at once; if he leaves
the house to hang out in the real world, he'll come back
and instant-message some more, and sometimes cut and paste
transcripts of these conversations into his online journal.
All this upkeep can get in the way of homework, he
admitted. ''You keep telling yourself, 'Don't look, don't
look!' And you keep on checking your e-mail.'' M. is an
unusually Zen teenage boy -- dreamy and ruminative about
his personal relationships. But his obsessive online habits
are hardly exceptional; he is one of a generation of
compulsive self-chroniclers, a fleet of juvenile Marcel
Prousts gone wild. When he meets new friends in real life,
M. offers them access to his online world. ''That's how you
introduce yourself,'' he said. ''It's like, here's my
cellphone number, my e-mail, my screen name, oh, and --
here's my LiveJournal. Personally, I'd go to that person's
LJ before I'd call them or e-mail them or contact them on
AIM'' -- AOL Instant Messenger -- ''because I would know
them better that way.''

Only five years ago, mounting an online journal or its
close cousin, the blog, required at least a modicum of
technical know-how. But today, using sites like LiveJournal
or Blogger or Xanga, users can sign up for a free account,
and with little computer knowledge design a site within
minutes. According to figures released last October by
Perseus Development Corporation, a company that designs
software for online surveys, there are expected to be 10
million blogs by the end of 2004. In the news media, the
blog explosion has been portrayed as a transformation of
the industry, a thousand minipundits blooming. But the vast
majority of bloggers are teens and young adults. Ninety
percent of those with blogs are between 13 and 29 years
old; a full 51 percent are between 13 and 19, according to
Perseus. Many teen blogs are short-lived experiments. But
for a significant number, they become a way of life, a
daily record of a community's private thoughts -- a kind of
invisible high school that floats above the daily life of
teenagers.

Back in the 1980's, when I attended high school, reading
someone's diary would have been the ultimate intrusion. But
communication was rudimentary back then. There were no
cellphones, or answering machines; there was no
''texting,'' no MP3's or JPEG's, no digital cameras or
file-sharing software; there was no World Wide Web -- none
of the private-ish, public-ish, superimmediate forums kids
today take for granted. If this new technology has provided
a million ways to stay in touch, it has also acted as both
an amplifier and a distortion device for human intimacy.
The new forms of communication are madly contradictory:
anonymous, but traceable; instantaneous, then saved forever
(unless deleted in a snit). In such an unstable
environment, it's no wonder that distinctions between
healthy candor and ''too much information'' are in flux and
that so many find themselves helplessly confessing, as if a
generation were given a massive technological truth serum.

A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private
experience of adolescence -- a period traditionally marked
by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions
wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer -- has been
made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the
operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic
misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes.
Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for
attention, then fret when they get it. And everything
parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view
them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.)
But the linked journals also form a community, an
intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy --
a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it
feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

For many in the generation that has grown up online, the
solution is not to fight this technological loss of
privacy, but to give in and embrace it: to stop worrying
and learn to love the Web. It's a generational shift that
has multiple roots, from Ricki Lake to the memoir boom to
the A.A. confessional, not to mention 13 seasons of ''The
Real World.'' The teenagers who post journals have
(depending on your perspective) a degraded or a relaxed
sense of privacy; their experiences may be personal, but
there's no shame in sharing. As the reality-television
stars put it, exposure may be painful at times, but it's
all part of the process of ''putting it out there,''
risking judgment and letting people in. If teen bloggers
give something up by sloughing off a self-protective layer,
they get something back too -- a new kind of intimacy, a
sense that they are known and listened to. This is their
life, for anyone to read. As long as their parents don't
find out.

It was early September, the start of the school year in an
affluent high school in Westchester County, just north of
New York City, where I was focusing my teen-blogging
expedition. The halls were filled with students and the
walls were covered with posters urging extracurricular
activities. (''Instant popularity, minus the hazing,'' read
one.) I had come looking for J., a boy I'd never seen,
though I knew many of the details of his life. (J., like
most of the teenage bloggers I interviewed, insisted he not
be identified, in part because his parents didn't know
about his blog.) On a Web site called Blurty, he kept an
online journal, titled ''Laugh at Me.'' In his user profile
he described himself this way: ''I have depression, bad
skin, weight problems, low self-esteem, few friends and
many more reasons why I am angry.'' In his online
outpourings, J. inveighed hilariously against his parents,
his teachers and friends who had let him down. ''Hey
everyone ever,'' he wrote in one entry. ''Stop making fun
of people. It really is a sucky thing to do, especially if
you hate being made fun of yourself. . . . This has been a
public service announcement. You may now resume your stupid
hypocritical, lying lives.''

I was half-expecting a pimply nightmare boy, all
monosyllables and misery. Instead, J. turned out to be a
cute 15-year-old with a shy smile. A little bit jittery, he
sat with his knees apart, admiring his own Converse
sneakers. He had chosen an unfortunately public place for
this interview -- a stairwell near the cafeteria and
directly across from the teacher's lounge -- although he
insisted that we were in an obscure location.

J. had had his Blurty journal for about a year. He called
it ''better than therapy,'' a way to get out his true
feelings -- all the emotions he thought might get him in
trouble if he expressed them in school or at home. Online,
he could blurt out confessions of loneliness and
insecurity, worrying aloud about slights from friends. Yet
despite the fact that he knew that anyone who wanted to
could read his journal -- and that a few friends did,
leaving comments at the ends of his posts -- he also
maintained the notion that what he was doing was private.
He didn't write for an audience, he said; he just wrote
what he was feeling.

Writing in his online journal was cathartic for him, he
said, but it was hardly stress-free. A week earlier, he
left a post about an unrequited crush, and an anonymous
someone appended negative comments, remarks J. wouldn't
detail (he deleted them), but which he described with
distress as ''disgusting language, vulgarities.'' J.
panicked, worried that the girl he liked might learn about
the vulgar comments and, by extension, his attraction to
her. It was a somewhat mysterious concern. Couldn't the
girl have read his original post, I asked? And anyway,
didn't he secretly want her to read his journal? ''Of
course,'' he moaned, leaning against the banister. ''For
all I know she does. For all I know, she doesn't.''

J.'s sense of private and public was filled with these
kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read,
and feared that people would read them, and hoped that
people would read them, and didn't care if people read
them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his
outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that
were explicitly public -- announcing a band practice, for
instance -- he also had his own stringent notions of
etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had
never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.

In any case, today he was in a strikingly good mood. After
a year of posting his journal on Blurty, which few of his
fellow students used, he was switching to a different Web
site: LiveJournal, the enclave of many kids in his school's
punk set. He'd spent the last day or two transferring all
his old posts, setting up a friends list and concocting a
new ''icon,'' the tiny symbol that would represent him when
he posted: a blurry shot of his face in profile. Unlike
Blurty, where accounts are free for anyone who signs up,
LiveJournal was restricted. (That policy has since
changed.) You either had to pay to join (which J. couldn't
afford) or be offered a coveted membership -- a private
''code'' -- by someone who already belonged. The policy was
intended to make members accountable to one another, but it
also had the effect of creating an invisible clique. For
J., it was a sign that he might belong at last.

While the sites that are hosts to online journals may
attract different crowds, their formats vary only slightly:
a LiveJournal is a Blurty is a Xanga is a DeadJournal is a
DiaryLand. A typical page shows a dated list of entries,
beginning with the most recent. Many posts are short,
surrealistic one-liners: ''I just peeled a freckle off my
neck. Does that mean it's not a freckle?'' Others are more
like visual poems, featuring a quirky series of scanned
pictures (monkeys and robots are popular), a quote from a
favorite song or a link to a strange news story. Some posts
consist of transcripts of instant-message conversations,
posted with or without permission (a tradition I discovered
when a boy copied one of our initial online conversations
under the heading ''i like how older people have grammar
online'').

But a significant number of writers treat their journals as
actual diaries, toting up detailed accounts of their day.
''I watched the miracle of life today in bio, and it was
such a huge letdown,'' read one post. ''I was expecting it
to be funny and sexual but it was way too scientific for my
liking, and a bit yucky too, but not as bad as people made
it out to be. Although, my not being able to laugh made me
feel a bit too old. Current mood: disappointed.''

Then there are the kinds of posts that fulfill a parent's
worst paranoia. ''It was just a nite of lying to my dad,''
reads one entry posted last fall. ''At like 7ish we started
drinking, but i didnt have THAT much. And i figured out y i
drink so much. Cuz i really really don't like being sober
with drunk people. . . . i have more homework to do than
imaginable. And to make it better, im hungover and feel
sick. Great . . . great. DRINKING IS BAD!!''

Other entries are just plain poignant. ''My father is suing
my mom on no real grounds. He just wants to 'destroy her'
and I am trying my best to stay 'neutral.' Things seem real
foggy, but I am told that they should turn out for the
best. I just don't know. Affection needed. Current mood:
indescribable.''

If a journal may look at first like a simple recitation of
events, the fact that readers can comment renders it deeply
interactive. (On some sites, like Xanga, you can give
''eProps'' for particularly good posts -- the equivalent of
gold stars.) Most comments are wisecracks or sympathetic
one-liners. Occasionally people respond with hostility. The
threads of comments can amount to a public
miniconversation, in which a group of friends debates a
subject or plans an event or offers advice. ''I need your
help,'' one poster wrote. ''Yes, your help. You, the one
reading this . . . what am i supposed to do when the
dynamic of a once-romantic relationship sort of changes but
sort of doesn't, and the next week i continually try to get
in touch with the girl but she is either not there or can't
talk very long, and before this change in the dynamic she
was always available?'' A string of friends offered
suggestions, from ''don't call her so much'' to ''confront
her . . . what she's doing isn't fair to you.''

In daily life, most bloggers don't talk about what they say
online. One boy engaged in vociferous debates on Mideast
policy with another blogger, a senior a year ahead of him.
Yet the two never spoke in school, going only so far as to
make eye contact in the halls.

Silences like this can create paranoia. It may be that
friends just didn't read the post. Or it may mean they
thought the post was stupid. There's a temptation to take
silence -- in real life or online -- as a snub. ''If I get
a really mean comment and I go back and I look at it again,
and again, it starts to bother me,'' M. told me. ''But then
I think, If I delete it, everyone will know this bothers
me. But if I respond, it'll mean I need to fight back. So
it turns into a conflict, but it's fun. It's like a soap
opera, kind of.''

It's a drama heightened by the fact that journals are
linked to one another, creating a constant juxtaposition of
posts among the students. For example, on LiveJournal, you
can click a ''friends'' link and catch up on your friends'
experiences without ever speaking, with everyone's accounts
posted next to one another in a kind of word collage. For
many, this transforms daily life. Teen bloggers are
constantly considering how they'll turn a noteworthy moment
into an online post. After a party or a concert, these
accounts can amount to a prismatic portrait of the evening.

But even this endless linking only begins to touch on the
complex ways these blogs are obsessively interconnected and
personalized. L. has had an online journal for two and a
half years, and it has morphed along

with her. At first, her interest list (part of the user
profile) consisted of topics like aromatherapy, yoga and
Zen -- each of which linked to people with the same
interest. She deleted that list and started over. In her
next phase, she was obsessed with Freudian psychology. Now
she lists fashion trends and belongs to the Flapper, Saucy
Dwellings and Sex Tips blog rings.

Over the course of the fall, she changed the title of her
Web log more than five times. L. relishes the way subtle
choices of design and phrasing lend her posts a winking
mysteriousness, hinting at feelings without making them
explicit. ''I don't think I reveal too much; if I'm upset,
I don't say why,'' she told me. ''In the beginning, I was
just like, there shouldn't be private posts, this should
all be public. But then it makes you very vulnerable.'' And
her attitude goes double for her parents. ''I don't talk to
them about anything. They'll be like, 'How was school?' And
I'll be like, 'Fine.' And that was it.''

Many of a journal's markers of personal identity are
hilariously telegraphic. There are sometimes slots for a
journalizer's mood and current music. (Sample moods:
''stoned,'' ''restless,'' ''accomplished,'' ''confused''
and ''braces off Tuesday.'') Journal writers link en masse
to sardonic identity questionnaires, like ''How Indie Am
I?'' And every once in a while, someone posts a random list
of questions, and everyone's journal fills up with
simultaneous answers to queries like ''Do you believe in an
afterlife?'' or ''Name Four Things You Wish You Had.''
(''1. A flat tummy; 2. people that would miss me; 3. my
copy of 'perks of being a wallflower' back; 4. talent at
ANYTHING.'')

It's possible to make posts private -- or ''friends only''
-- but many journal keepers don't bother, or do so only for
selected posts. The general degree of anonymity varies:
some bloggers post their full names, others give quirky,
quasi-revelatory handles. No wonder everyone is up till 5
a.m. tweaking their font size and Photoshopping a new icon.
At heart, an online journal is like a hyperflexible
adolescent body -- but better, because in real life, it
takes money and physical effort to add a piercing, or to
switch from zip-jacketed mod to Abercrombie prepster. A
LiveJournal or Blurty offers a creative outlet with a
hundred moving parts. And unlike a real journal, with a
blog, your friends are all around, invisible voyeurs -- at
least until they chime in with a comment.

For many of the suburban students I met, online journals
are associated with the ''emo'' crowd -- a sarcastic term
for emotional, and a tag for a musical genre mingling
thrash-punk with confessionalism. The emo kids tend to be
the artsy loners and punks, but as I spent more time
lurking in journals and talking to the kids who wrote them,
I began to realize that these threads led out much farther
into the high school, into pretty much every clique.

On a sunny fall day, M. and his friends were hanging out in
front of a local toy store, shooting photos of one another
with digital cameras, when a group of three girls sashayed
by. They sported tank tops, identical hairbands and
identical shiny hair. I walked over to them and asked if
they have LiveJournals. ''No,'' one said. ''We have
Xangas.''

They were all 15, around the same age as M. and his
friends. But the two groups had never read the other's
posts. M.'s crowd was emo (or at least emo-ish; like
''politically correct,'' ''emo'' is a word people rarely
apply to themselves). These girls were part of the athletic
crowd. There was little overlap, online or off. But the
girls were fully familiar with the online etiquette M.
described: they instant-messaged compulsively; they
gossiped online.

With so much confessional drama, I began to wonder if
interactions ever swung out of control. Does anyone ever
post anything that seems like too much information? I
asked. They all nodded intently, tossing nervous eye
contact back and forth.

''Yeah,'' one of the girls replied finally, with a deep
sigh. ''This one girl, she was really upset, and she would
write things that had happened to her that were really
scary. Private things that didn't really need to be said on
the site -- ''

Her friend interrupted: ''But she knew she was putting it
out there. She said, 'I don't care.' ''

''It was nice that she was comfortable about it,''
suggested the third girl.

Her friend disagreed. ''It was not nice.''

What kinds of
things did she write about? I asked. Eating disorders? Sex?
''All of it,'' they said in unison. ''All of it.''

I walked back to M. and his group. ''Those girls are just,
like, social girls,'' said M. dismissively. When I told him
they had online journals, he seemed astonished. ''Really?''
He said. ''Huh.'' He watched with amusement as they walked
away.

Blogging is a replication of real life: each pool of blogs
is its own ecosystem, with only occasional links to other
worlds. As I surfed from site to site, it became apparent
that as much as journals can break stereotypes, some
patterns are crushingly predictable: the cheerleaders post
screen grabs of the Fox TV show ''The O.C.''; kids who
identify with ''ghetto'' culture use hip-hop slang; the
geeks gush over Japanese anime. And while there are
exceptions, many journal writers exhibit a surprising lack
of curiosity about the journals of true strangers. They're
too busy writing posts to browse.

But even diaries that seem at first predictable can have
the power to startle. Take J.K., whose Xanga titled ''No
Fat Chicks'' features a peculiar mix of introspection and
bully-boy bombast. Some of J.K.'s entries this fall brooded
on his bench-warmer status on the football team. ''Do the
coaches want me to quit?'' he worried in one post. ''I know
that some people have to sit out, that's just the way it
works, and I accept that. But does it have to be me when
we're down 36 points and the clock is winding down?''

In J.K.'s diary, revelations of insecurity alternate with
chest-beating bombast, juvenile jokes and self-mocking
claims of sexual prowess. From a teen poet, you expect
angsty navel-gazing; it's more surprising to find it in a
jock like J.K. In one post, he analyzed his history as a
bully during ''middle school, the time of popularity,''
when he did ''things too heinous to even mention.'' In
response, a reader posted a long, angry comment, doubting
J.K.'s sincerity: ''I don't think you understand what
hatred I used to have for you because of how you made me
feel . . . you can't go back in time, but you can try to
make up for what you've done in the past.''

Occasionally, a particularly scandalous site will gain a
wider readership. It's a social phenomenon made possible by
technology: the object of gossip using her Web site as a
public stage to tell her side of the story, to everyone,
all at once. As I asked around the high school, I found
that many other students had heard of the girl the ''social
girls'' had described to me -- a student whose confessional
postings had became something of a must-read the spring
before. Over the course of a monthslong breakdown, she
posted graphic descriptions of cutting herself, family
fights, sex. It was all documented on her Web log, complete
with photos and real names. (She has since removed the
material from her site.)

The blog turned her into a minor celebrity, at first among
the social crowd, then among their friends and siblings as
well. ''We were addicted -- we would track every minute,''
one student explained. ''We would call each other and go,
'Oh, my god, she wrote again!' '' With each post, her
readers would encourage her to write more. ''Wow u should
be writing a book,'' one wrote. ''Ur stories are exactly
like one of those teen diary books that other teens can
relate to. That might sound corny but its so true.''

The girls who read the journal were divided on the subject.
Some called the Web site an unhealthy bid for attention --
not to mention revenge, since she often posted unflattering
details about her ex-boyfriend and former friends. Others
were more sympathetic. ''I think I empathized with her
after reading it, because I'd just heard the stories,'' one
girl explained. ''But then she was saying, 'I felt so sad,
and I was in this really dark place, and my parents were
fighting, and I was cutting myself' -- so I could
understand it more. Before, it was just gossip. It made her
seem more like a person than just, like, this character.''

These dynamics are invisible to most adults, whether at
home or school. Students occasionally show the school
psychologist their journals, pulling up posts on her
computer or sharing printed transcripts of instant
messages. But the psychologist rarely sought them out
herself, she told me, and she was surprised to hear that
boys kept them. She called the journals a boon for shy
students and admired the way they encouraged kids to
express themselves in writing. But she also noticed a
recent rise in journal-based conflicts, mostly situations
where friends attack one another after a falling out.
''They think that they're getting close by sharing,'' she
said, ''but it allows them to say things they wouldn't
otherwise say, to be hurtful at a distance.'' When I
mentioned the material I'd read about the girl who was
cutting herself, she went silent. ''You know,'' she said,
''I really should read more into these.''

The scandalous journal is an extreme variation, but teen
bloggers often joke about the pressure to post with angst;
controversy gets more commentary, after all. (Entries often
apologize for not having anything exciting to say.) But if
there's something troubling about the kind of online
scandal that breeds a high-school Sylvia Plath -- an
angstier-than-thou exhibitionism -- there's also something
almost utopian at the endeavor's heart. So much high-school
pain comes from the sense of being alone with one's stupid,
self-destructive impulses. With so many teenagers baring
their vulnerabilities, there is the potential for breaking
down isolation. A kind of online Breakfast Club, perhaps,
in which a little surfing turns up the insecurity that
lurks in all of us.

For some journal keepers, the connections made online can
be life-altering. In late November, I checked in on J., the
author of ''Laugh at Me.'' All fall, his LiveJournal had
been hopping, documenting milestones (a learner's permit!),
philosophical insights, complaints about parental dorkiness
and plans for something called Operation Backfire, in which
he mocks another kid he hates -- a kid who has filled his
own journal on Xanga with right-wing rants. ''I felt
happy/victorious,'' wrote J. about taunting his enemy.
''And rightly so.''

In the new context of LiveJournal, J.'s posts had become
increasingly interactive, with frequent remarks about
parties and weekend plans; they seemed less purely
rantlike, and he was posting comments on other people's
journals. When I contacted him via instant message, he told
me that he was feeling less friendless than he was when the
semester started.

''I feel more included and such,'' he typed just after
Thanksgiving, describing the effect of having switched to
LiveJournal from his more isolated Blurty. ''All
community-ish.'' He was planning to attend a concert of
World/Inferno Friendship Society, a band with a LiveJournal
following. And he'd become closer friends in real life with
some fellow LJ'ers, including L., who had given J. an emo
makeover. He'd begun wearing tight, dark jeans and had
''forcibly retired'' his old sneakers.

Once J. decided to switch to LiveJournal, LiveJournal began
changing him in turn. Perhaps he was adjusting himself to
reflect the way he is online: assertive and openly
emotional, more than a bit bratty. He'd become more
comfortable talking to girls. And if he seemed to have
forgotten his invocation not to make fun of anyone, at
least he was standing up for himself.

J. had also signed up for a new online journal: a Xanga. He
got it, he said, to branch out. He wanted to be able to
comment on the journals of other students he knows are out
there, including that of bully-boy J.K., where I was
surprised to find one of J.'s comments in early November.
''I made a xanga for myself because i keep hearing that
that's whats 'cool' now,'' he wrote on his LJ with a
distinctive mixture of rue and satisfaction, the very
flavor of adolescent change. ''And yet i always try to
pride myself on not following status quo. I'm a hypocrite.
O yes i am. Current mood: Hypocritical. Current music:
Mogwai.''