Are you going to be in the yearbook?
This year’s edition of Middlebury’s yearbook Kaleidoscope is already in production, and the money for it spent. The only question at this point is, will your face be in it?
You can upload your face picture (and others) on the yearbook’s photo upload website using the login information sent to your email, or you can ask kaleidoscope@middlebury.edu.
Despite my personal skepticism of whether or not this yearly publication in its current form is right for Midd (see below), I’ve submitted my picture. Here’s a list of reasons that you might do the same…
- POST-GRAD LOVE LIFE, PLAN B. Senior crush lists don’t always work. Maybe your Proctor crush is too alternative for Facebook. Adding your most flattering picture to the yearbook increases your chances–from zero to slightly higher-than-zero–that the lucky gal or guy will stumble across your face in just in time for your 5th reunion weekend….
YOUR FACE (IN PRINT!). Yes, a bit vain, perhaps, but user-edited Web media completely takes the fun out of seeing oneself on the Internet. Who doesn’t get a little kick out of seeing your name or face in print?- RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE 2010s. If I had posted a picture of myself like the one to the right on FB, and then found out I was going to be U.S. president a few decades later, I probably would have untagged it or deleted it long before the fact. Having a concrete freeze-frame of your 2010 hairdo and granola Vermont style will force you to take a bit of ownership for the good ol’ days in front of your kids.
- MAKING THE MOST OF IT. You don’t decide exactly how your tax dollars are spent, but you still benefit in some respect from the programs and security that they buy. Likewise, if you disagree with the yearbook, it will nonetheless be published in June with the label “Middlebury College 2009-2010.” If you were a part of that, it seems a waste of your student activities money not to be included.
What’s there to disagree about? Last March, MiddBlog posted on why Middlebury doesn’t need a yearbook. To recap the reasoning, still valid from its original posting a year ago:
- Publishing a yearbook is expensive, especially as it’s provided “free” to seniors (they’ve paid into the student activities feed coffers for four years, and get a part of that back in the form of the book).
- It isn’t a well-known part of Middlebury graduation tradition.
- Documenting everything from an entire year at a busy place like Midd seems impossible.
- Most of all, perhaps, Facebook and the Web partially replace the need for the extra 200 pages of photos sitting on your shelf 10, 25, 50 years from now. Ditching the yearbook for FB ruins the sentimental part of it, but on the upside would save a tree or two.
As much as I support participating in the current yearbook, I also think discussing the yearbook’s future should continue. It’s a large sum of money being spent, going towards a publication that many say (today) that they’re against.
MiddBlog wants to know. What’s your take? Is a Midd yearbook worth the money? Will you value a yearbook down the road, or is Facebook the answer? How should the idea of a yearbook adapt to the “social media age”? Does DePauw University have it right?
