ABSTRACT
By the late twentieth century, personal computers and the internet had changed how people recorded their lives in diary form. We might assume that because of the digital revolution, paper diaries would disappear. However, studies show that people under twenty-five prefer paper diaries and journals over digital apps. This chapter challenges the notion that analogue belongs to the past and digital to the future. Instead, it explores the “post-digital,” where online and analogue technologies coexist. The growing interest in planners, travel diaries and analogue memory keeping should be understood within this framework. Diary studies can connect this trend to the way individuals construct their identities—both shaped by and resisting digital affordances—through analogue creativity and self-improvement inspired by liberal ideals circulating online.
