Yahoo! Timecapsule: What would you like to say to the future?

Yahoo! launched a new subpage called Timecapsule at timecapsule.yahoo.com. Although not very popular in the Netherlands, a timecapsule can be put in the ground with some stuff you think are important to you at that time, you dig it up fifty years later and you can look back at all those memories.

Jonathan Harris, the man and artist behind Yahoo! Timecapsule, thought this would be a great idea to try out on the web. And so we now have a digital timecapsule. Accessible to the whole world to put in their messages of Faith, Sorrow, Fun, Anger and lots more. In a personal note on the website, Harris notices: “Yahoo! Time Capsule sets out to collect a portrait of the world – a single global image composed of millions of individual contributions. This time capsule is defined not by the few items a curator decides to include, but by the items submitted by every human on earth who wishes to participate.”

A few days after the start though, Michael Krumboltz from Yahoo! Timecapsule writes in the Encapsuled blog that the Anger category seemed to draw the most text submissions. Interesting stuff, because I think this Timecapsule is a reflection of a whole group of people (Yahoo! users). It’s even mass psychology maybe.

So what do we want others to think of us in 2020? Because that is when the Timecapsule will be opened, at Yahoo!’s 25th anniversary: “After 30 days, time capsule content will be saved onto a digital archive and sealed, to be opened at Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. on the company’s 25th anniversary in the year 2020. In addition, copies of this content will be presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings archives in Washington, DC to be preserved, studied and shared with future generations.”

(also posted on newmw.wordpress.com)