According to literary scholar Kylie Cardell the contemporary diary can take a variety of forms: ‘a performative space, a print genre, a digital platform, a behavior regime, a smartphone app’. Traditionally, as Cardell reports, the diary is viewed as a fundamentally private and intimate mode of selfdocumentation and self-examination. Think here of old fashioned daily or nightly ‘Dear Diary’ regimes which provided a space to divulge (and commit to paper) one's innermost dreams, desires, thoughts, and feelings. When such diaristic activity is presented on a digital platform, the confidant invoked by ‘Dear Diary’ is replaced by the fickle and unreliable ‘Dear Public’ or ‘Dear World’ as the title of Cardell's book puts it.

On the typical online blog, the entries (daily or otherwise) that would normally constitute the substance of a personal diary are presented to readers in real time and are often subject to interaction from others; approbation or criticism can be expressed through the comments function. Alongside these kinds of text-based online life writings, increasingly images are being used as a means to chronicle the occurrences and concerns of daily life; photographs are as much ‘a trace of a moment’, as Phillipe Lejeune puts it, as a written diary note. Indeed Cardell cites James E. Young's contention that diaries are like photographs insofar as they are ‘remnants of their objects’ that have the authority of reality. This chapter considers what kinds of diaristic self-reporting and self-reflection are facilitated by the image-sharing digital platform Instagram.