The World, the Flesh and the Devil
Collective behavior has always been the sort of thing no one can change. Although quite a few people believe it can be handled more or less in the same way as cattle, it can't. You can feel trends getting in and out and nothing can change the course of that.
I have this odd idea that the events of September 11, 2001 were directly responsible for a radical change in the way people wrote about themselves on the internet. The so called online journals were much more open, the content was much more intimate and candid, as if people were willing to write online exactly as their great-grandparents usesd to do on paper. That changed sixteen years ago, when, especially (but not only) in America, exposing too much kind of became the wrong thing to do.
As usual, this can be a solid theory as much as it can be one hell of a lot of horseshit. Maybe people have found other interests. Jeanne Moreau, whose name and image is everywhere today because she died yesterday, once said that weare going through times of great competition. In the past, she said, films had a permanent audience that could be counted to be there forever. Now a filmgoer is someone who may go to the movies as much as he can watch cable TV, or have fun on the internet, or listen to a music channel, or-- or-- or--
The fact is that online journals are not what they used to be. Therefore, a great number of them are abandoned. Online journals are fast becoming a replica of those ghost towns that proliferated at the end of the gold rush, or so they say.
I haven't come to terms, not yet, with going on writing online, in a foreign language, what I should be writing privately in a blank book. The idea is that writing online you share the stuff with others as much as you have access to their private worlds by reading their journals. Maybe in the beginning it happened that way. Not anymore. Now keeping an online journal makes me feel like the lead, played by Harry Belafonte, in The World, the Flesh and the Devil, the movie that scarred me the most in my whole life.
I was a child when I saw that movie. But I can still remember how the image of Harry Belafonte walking in the middle of the street, trying to understand where had everybody gone, was more terrifying to me than Christopher Lee saying "I am Drrrrrrracula!"