Disappearing School Yearbooks

Another old tradition looks like to be a dying one. The college yearbook that has been a staple of every campus for more than 100 years is being replaced by social media sites like Face book, where campus postings are more current and updated. Right here in Oregon, the state University says it may stop publishing the Oregon State University because sales have fallen so low that it can't find a publisher willing to print it. A number of other universities in the United States are also getting rid of that old faithful yearbook that made us all look like the dorks that we really are.

At $50 a book many students are passing on buying one at Oregon State, and only a few even bother to have their photo taken for the yearbook. Last year only 60 students stopped by the yearbook office to have their photos taken for it. As a result, this year's Oregon State yearbook won't even include student portraits. This is another example of the digital electronics age killing the more simpler and , in my opinion, the more noble, traditions, even on a school campus.

Though most students did I never bought a college yearbook when I was a student, but I did purchase them every year when in primary and in high school, both for myself and for when Jane when was a student. Probably, more people feel an affinity to their much smaller elementary or high school than to the huge university campuses (Oregon State has 26,000 students),. Size of school is quite a unifying factor of a school campus. We identify more with what we seem to be more a part of. So I think school yearbooks are not now as endangered outside of the college campus.

But there are people like me who prefer to have a printed version of anything to a digital one. I want to put a book on the shelf of my book case, handle it, and share it with others directly. Digital technology seems sterile to me, and those crazy digital formats become "outdated' so quickly now the digital world is one of frustration. It's not fun, for example, to find a treasured photo that can not be opened because "the file is not compatible to the operating system". Books never become incompatible.

Despite having written all of this I know that kids today grow up in a digital world (poor things!) and have little frame of reference in which to compare paper sources to electronic information sources. They will pick digital because they will never know the joy of holding a book in the hand when reading it. I can only sigh and say that you know not what you miss, digital addicts.