Facebook in the classroom: Children's writings in school diaries (1950-1990)

The article rebuilds the development of the use of school diaries by pupils in Netherlands secondary schools between the 1950s and the 1980s, showing the progressive shift from tools for writing down homework and planning school activities to lifestyle documents showing the cultural identity of their owners. In the 1980s youth preferences were incorporated by publishing houses into school diaries. In the article, 10 diaries from the 1980s are analysed and compared with 16 from the period between 1950 and 1979. In the 1980s, like in previous decades, they still contained popular and personal poems about love and sex, they were filled with cut-out images of pop artists and comic strips, and they were packed with texts that nowadays would be defined as chats, tweets, or graffiti. In other words, they were already fulfilling the main functions of social media like Facebook at times when computers were not used in education and the Internet did not yet exist.