Black hole of cyberspace swallowing up yearbooks

R.I.P., the high school yearbook.

While it may be a bit premature to permanently lay to rest that once-ultimate document of the high school experience, its demise has already been noted in some parts of the country and sales have plummeted just about everywhere else.

My good blogging friend, Stefani Twyford of Legacy Multimedia in Houston, Texas, brought this matter to my attention, referring to an article in the Houston Chronicle.

There was a time less than a generation ago when as many as 80 percent of high school students bought yearbooks, a figure that now stands around 10-20 percent in those areas where a yearbook is published at all.

The culprit appears to be the proliferation of social networking sites, like MySpace and  Facebook, which have made yearbooks seem positively quaint in this cyber age. As one who will attend my own high school reunion this summer, I wonder how the current electronic sites will factor into the reunions of the MySpace generation. Yearbooks are the source document for every high school reunion I’ve attended and I can’t imagine a reunion without them or suitable surrogates.

For my father, his high school yearbook yielded an unexpected connection with a person he’s never met and who lives several states away.

A couple of years ago, Dad received via mail a copy of the yearbook from his senior year along with a letter. The letter explained that the yearbook was a gift from a Texas attorney who had acquired it at a garage sale. The attorney had gone through a rough patch of substance abuse that had cost him his career and marriage a few years back and part of his therapy was to find yearbooks at garage sales, pick one person from the senior class, track that person down and send them the yearbook.

Although the attorney has restored his life and has rebuilt his career, he continues to seek out the yearbooks. My dad was inspired by the experience and, since he already had a copy of the yearbook, he called a few classmates to offer them his extra copy but found they had kept theirs, too. Keep in mind that these people graduated from high school 70 years ago.

Do you think today’s high school seniors will be keeping their MySpace profiles 70 years from now?

Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --  Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.

Flickr photo courtesy of portia91.

Comments

[tori]

Very thought provoking post. Thanks! Of course even if students wanted to keep their yearbooks for 70 years I don't believe Facebook or MySpace as organizations in their currently recognized form will be around a fraction of that time which is what makes print the compelling medium when migrating digital content is such a huge challenge.

And yet I think you've touched on a potentially huge market for an inventive entrepreneur or social network partnership: Aggregating student profiles into Print On Demand books at the end of each school year. Students could create a personalized "yearbook page" and that page would essentially be frozen in time to be combined with others and ordered online through an existing company (like www.lulu.com). Now that would be a great project for the (former) high school senior yearbook committee.

Along those same lines why not even create a family yearbook? My father used to write a yearly Christmas letter but imagine the possibilities of getting extended families to create their own pages and publishing them all at once for a holiday or family reunion? Similar to scrap-booking but without the need for glue and prepackaged decorations, not to mention less stress for those with limited time and budgets...?!

[Heather McLeland-Wieser]

I work in a public library with a fabulous collection of local yearbooks. We help people everyday who either didn't buy the yearbook or lost their copy and who now need/want/crave a copy of that photo and sometimes many different photos. I can't imagine how we will be able to help these people 20 years from now.

[Larry Lehmer]

Tori: Those are some excellent ideas that you mention. I wish I had saved all those Christmas letters I've received over the years. They are, in fact, mini yearbooks.

Heather: A huge tip of the hat for the work you do. Many people don't realize what a great resource their local library is, and not just for circulating books. I'm amazed at how well my local library is able to keep up with the constant change in this digital age.

[Stefani Twyford]

Wow Larry, what an interesting story about the lawyer using yearbook therapy. Such a unique way of connecting the dots from the past to the present and I'm sure a huge surprise to whomever person was chosen from the entire book to be recipient of his gift. I love it. It brings to mind the Lost and Found Photos website (http://www.lostandfoundphotos.com) and all the other lost items floating around in the world with people looking at how to reunite them with their owners. Love letters or messages in a bottle, washed up on shore, find their way to their rightful owner due to some person's sheer determination to deliver them. Beautiful and moving story!
Great comments by Tori and Heather. More ideas to think about and develop aimed at preserving the past and creating snapshots in time.

[Larry Lehmer]

That whole lost and found thing is fascinating, Stefani. It's one of the delightful unintended consequences of the Internet that people are able to connect in ways that were previously impossible. Thanks for getting this thread rolling.