*CAN THE INTERNET MAINTAIN ITS ROLE AS A "DIRECT" MEDIUM?*

Jasmina Tesanovic,
Writer, Belgrade



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“...When the bombing started I already had half of the book finished, which was going to be published in the United States. Writing this diary,and writing in general, was always a kind of therapy for me. It was the only way I could stay sane. One day an old friend of mine, a Uruquaian writer living in Sweden, asked, “How are you?” I didn’t have time to tell her how I was doing, so I said, “Okay. I am writing this diary. I will send it to you...”

After some time a friend of mine from London mentioned that she saw my diary published on the Internet. “No way! I haven‘t published it on the Internet!,” I exclaimed. So she sent me a section of this on-line diary, which almost mirrored mine (I just wrote it and sent it out to others). I thought about how closely related this woman’s life and writing was to my own. There is no freedom in a war-time situation. The problem is that all is boring. We are all living the same lives, everybody is keeping the same diaries, everybody has children, and everybody has to buy this and that. “This diary is actually yours,” she said. Someone had actually published it without including my name in order to protect me. By this time the diary was on about 50 webpages without my name in 12 languages, even in Albanian and Arab...”