Is the Secret Diary a Discredited Trope?

It sounds as useful as lazy to me,

and I wonder whether nowadays secret diaries would be scraped out in favour of tumblr or the like, which I'm not certain it might be true for certain mind conditions such as personality disorders (specifically schizoid) to share ther minds on the internet as opposed to on a private paper book.

Also, internet diary-like platforms are notoriously harder to integrate into fiction.

I'm not sure. In this day and age, more and more people may want to ditch the good old-fashioned diary for a public blog, but there are still people that want to keep details of their lives private in some kind of journal, especially if they're not the type to seek attention and/or has some sort of secret which will cause them to be ostracized by people close to them, ie. poor family background, mental health issues and being in the LGBT.

If you're talking about Internet diaries, well, I don't know either. It could work out somehow, provided the person goes under an alias. Look at Belle du Jour for an example.

edited 25th Apr '17 8:30:41 AM by fdiaperhead

The whole point of a blog is to share your writing. The whole point of a Secret Diary is to not share it. Blogs and diaries are for two different purposes and would tend to be used by different types of people, or by the same person for different reasons.

It is not a discredited trope. Not by a long shot.

As already said (well, written), a secret diary is, by definition, secret. That makes it completely different from something like Tumblr, and while certainly there are people for whom diaries and blogs/Tumblr-esque sites are interchangeable, not everyone is like that, and it has to be noted that the people who do treat it that way do not care about keeping their diary secret.

Certainly, one would expect children to care about keeping things of that ilk secret less than they've cared about it in the past, for the increasing level of disregard for the privacy of data can make people think that it does not matter whether or not they keep that stuff to themselves. However, if you look at people who are aged about 30 or more, you can still get quite enough of secret-diary–writers amongst them; and even amongst children, there still are kids who do know not to make certain things public but still want to write about them and thus they have a secret diary.

Additionally, a “secret diary” does not actually have to be a diary. Certainly, it is harder to make something that is not a literal diary fit the trope, but it can happen. As an example, I do have an archive of snippets I wrote to free my head from them, and they all do have a date of creation, and notes about what inspired them with random other notes that are pretty much diary entries attached to them. Is it a diary? Well ... technically not; however, it does contain all the things I would have put in an actual diary had I not stopped writing it a week after I begun (because, being a kid back then, I was not very comfortable with every entry being about how my family is being bad again, and had it not been for that I would be writing an actual diary up to this day), it just contains more than that.

Additionally, some people have journals documenting stuff of various kinds. Those things too can be treated as diaries, as technically they are the same kind of thing, the difference being that journals document something whereas diaries everything in sight.

edited 25th Apr '17 11:35:38 AM by Kazeto

It wouldn't be obsolete for stories set in the past.

It's not obselete in the present either. Poll a decent amount of people and you'll still get some people who keeps a diary. My little brother keeps a journal, for that matter.

If you're convinced diaries are old fashion, make the owner and old person.