

The death of yearbooks - wallflower
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11670747

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dmv
_Although today’s students find yearbooks old-fashioned, they may one day miss
their vanished youth. Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and
the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the
permanence of ink on paper._

Other than concerns of walled gardens, the data need not go away, and being
electronic, it could remain more accessible. I have preserved -- and
referenced -- more documents from 15 years ago electronically than in hard
copy. The files have made their way from floppy discs to the cloud, from old
versions of MS Word and ClarisWorks to modern formats. Books like yearbooks?
No idea, probably in a box somewhere.

My parents gave me a bound copy of my emails from college (98-02) for a
historical record. While I've accessed some of those messages, it has always
been electronically. The bound copy is probably 2500 miles away in a basement.

Of course this is the concern of walled gardens. I used to carefully preserve
every email sent, and they move with me from mail host to mail host. I have
some confidence that my pictures on flickr need not go away, ever. When flickr
dies, I can extract them and move to the next storage system. Facebook
interactions are obviously more ephemeral...

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coglethorpe
I graduated from college in 1990 and considered yearbooks as "High School"
stuff back then. I didn't even know they made yearbooks for colleges anymore.

~~~
pchristensen
I didn't know colleges had yearbooks. Both of my universities were large (30K,
with 5-8K graduating each year) and I can't even imagine how a yearbook would
have worked. Sure, you could do them by school, but most of my friends were in
other schools and wouldn't have been in that book.

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RK
Why not make the yearbook an online publication? It will just get scanned in
(at poorer quality) down the road anyway.

~~~
pg
That would actually be a decent startup idea, if anyone wants to apply to YC
with it.

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fallentimes
In college, two years ago, they had to give them away for free - no one had
any interest in buying them.

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edw519
_the traditional yearbook looks like a bit of a dinosaur_

It always did. Yearbooks were never cool. You just bought it because everyone
did.

 _Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons
dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of
ink on paper._

 _That's_ the real point of a yearbook. Line a fine wine, it's not really
appreciated until years later.

I just went to my college reunion and spent time in the library browsing
through my years' yearbooks. For the first time, I finally understood why they
put all those lame pictures in: to capture the "feeling" of those days. Years
later, it worked.

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wallflower
Not all colleges had them but when and where I went to school we had to send
in a passport-sized photo to be used in a directory of all the incoming
freshmen that listed high school, where you were from, your declared (if you
had one) major. It was called the facebook

