Online yearbooks: Fad or the Future

We live in an increasingly digital, computerized world. It is inevitable that this technology would be applied to yearbooks. An online yearbook is a counterintuitive, seemingly blasphemous concept. Is it something that will endure, or just a transient fad?

First, the obvious. A yearbook is a physical book. Traditionally, anyway. E-books are becoming very popular. Why not create e-yearbooks?

You can't autograph a computer screen the way you can physical paper. There is something about the experience of reading hand written notes decades later than no computer can currently replicate. Signing an e-book is impossible.

Or is it?

Online yearbooks can contain blogs, in which people sign a yearbook in a virtual manner, as if via e-mail or Facebook. To those used to physical yearbooks, this is an inferior substitute. But perhaps not to younger generations who pop out of their Moms with iPhones in hand and make Facebook pages while still in the uterus. These days babies pop out and say, "Mom, why didn't you Facebook me in there?"

Online yearbooks are transient. Paper yearbooks cannot be altered. There are hundreds spread out. An online yearbook hosted on a single server can be changed by simply hacking that server. If it is changed without anyone knowing, history is edited, ala 1984 by Orwell. The CIA and military industrial complex loves the idea of being able to erase anyone from history if they don't do what the establishment says.

Printed yearbooks can be costly, but online yearbooks are free. You may be better off and not care about the cost, but many poor students in ghettos can't afford yearbooks. Online yearbooks solve this problem.

Online yearbooks are also easier to distribute. They can be transferred anywhere on Earth instantaneously, which a physical paper book cannot.

Online yearbooks also don't require paper, and are more environmentally ethical.

It is true that an online yearbook cannot be signed with a pen like a paper yearbook can, but a paper yearbook cannot record video. Imagine a well-designed online yearbook in which one signs by leaving a one minute video snippet which the person can review forever, even decades later.

Printers worry about lost revenue as less and less yearbooks are physically printed. They could charge fees to host yearbook sites and design and set them up. They could also sell standalone tablet computers which might be stored on shelves like books, turned after lying dormant for years, and replay video of long lost acquaintances. Companies could recoup revenue by adapting and selling e-yearbooks.

Normal yearbooks only show a few pictures of intramural activities, an online yearbook could show video of a game winning homecoming touchdown or school play.

A normal paper yearbook documents a single brief period of the past, an online yearbook can keep a continual history, showing what everyone has done (or hasn't) since high school. It would a kind of never ending class reunion. You wouldn't have to wait years to see how old classmates turned out. Which would make reunions which are often suspenseful a bit anticlimactic.