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

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...