Everyone’s an anthropologist

Posted October 9th, 2006 at 6:05 pm by Bill Gannon, Editorial

 6 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Our Users, Trends & News

Last year for Yahoo!’s 10th birthday, a cross-functional team created the Yahoo! Netrospective — a collection of the Internet’s 100 greatest moments in the 10 years since David and Jerry founded Yahoo!. The project was notable as much for the choices we made (yes, we featured the dancing baby and other web moments, great and small) as for the design by artist Jonathan Harris, one of the great digital designers of our time.

Today we unveiled a project that’s been percolating for years: A digital mosaic of our users’ lives and times in whatever form they want to submit — video, images, words, drawings, or sound. I had personally long envisioned users sharing their contributions and engaging in conversations before we’d seal everything up, maybe encase the hard drives in Lucite, and entrust it to a museum somewhere, somehow for a decade or so.

In other words, we’re creating the world’s largest Internet time capsule.

For the next month, we’ll be asking users from around the world to submit expressions around love, anger, fun, sorrow, faith, beauty, past, now, hope and “you.” They will create a massive electronic anthropology project, which we’ll open up on Yahoo!’s 25th anniversary in 2020. Our Customer Care team will review every submission — in 10 languages — truly a Herculean effort. And people will be thanked for their contribution by helping Yahoo! divvy up a $100,000 donation (courtesy of Yahoo! for Good) among seven global charitable organizations. When it closes, we will be presenting the Time Capsule content to the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings archives.

To bring it all to life, we signed Jonathan Harris again. When his design arrived, we were stunned to see a work of remarkable simplicity and universality. Jonathan explains it best in his artist statement:

“When the time capsule opens, it displays the 100 most recent contributions, which form the spinning globe. The 10 themes orbit the globe in a pinwheel pattern. At any moment, any individual tile can be clicked, causing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, revealing detailed information about the tile and the person who created it… Viewers can specify the population they wish to see, exploring such demographics as “men in their 20s from New York City” and “Iraqi women who submitted drawings in response to the question: What do you love?”

So the Time Capsule is now open. Will the world love it? Ignore it? Will the Time Capsule demonstrate what separates us, or what binds us together? What will this digital mosaic reveal about our lives and these fast-moving times?

We’ll all find out together in the next 30 days.

Bill Gannon
Senior Editorial Director & Managing Editor

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6 Comments Add your own

navin | October 9th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

We should love it, this is so cool! This is big, Yahoo!

navin | October 9th, 2006 at 8:40 pm

WoW, thank you. This is like a page from science fiction, coming true!

Brinke Guthrie | October 11th, 2006 at 8:52 am

Nice job. Sent up a photo of our dear kitty Sherman.

Marianne | October 12th, 2006 at 2:20 pm

I read somewhere that Mexico won’t allow you to beam the timecapsule from teoticuahan (spelling?). You might check with the Peruvian government, they have several lovely Incan temples, and are always in need of money.
Best wishes!

Bart | October 13th, 2006 at 4:51 am

That is an awsome idea, like almost always Yahoo! is the best. I am going to talk about it around me.

I just checked the time capsule and it looks great too!

Go Yahoo! I really hope you guys are still around and kicking in 2020!

Kyle Korleski | October 19th, 2006 at 2:51 pm

Would we be able to see the original Geocities in this time capsule?