We live busy lives here at Georgetown, as we’re always happy to tell you. We have too much homework. We go to too many events. We spend most of our time on the move, shuffling between meetings. And, along the way, we see an awful lot of flyers. Some are funny, some oblique, some so crammed with graphics you can’t tell what they are advertising this time.
And I want it to go away. I want there to be less flyers on this campus. I dream, ladies and gentlemen, of pushing a door that is a solid, unbroken brown pane. I dream of bare lampposts, of seeing the actual bricks in the Red Square archway. I want blue electrical tape to be used for … whatever it is usually used for, rather than to outline program board events or dinners. I want some space.
I know this request is both radical and trivial. I admit that flyers are useful. I often find out about things through flyers before any other method of communication. Flyers are punchy and get the information across quickly and easily, and having lots of flyers around make your event seem like a big deal.
It’s all gone too far; we’ve descended into a sort of arms race of flyering. Have you ever been in Red Square early on a Monday morning? You have to get there while it’s still dark to get your flyers up because by 10 a.m. there’s not an inch of space left. If you get there at 11 a.m. you’re left waiting for the excessively heavy posters from Teach for America to fall so you can steal their spot.
Flyering is a drain on resources. No matter where you steal your copy machine time from, somebody’s paying for paper, ink, copy machines, printers and toner. Not to mention the extra cost of the glossy, colored flyers, or those new business cards. And it’s a drain on the environment. There are about 300 flyers put up for each event, and we all know how many of those there are. With approximately 8,333 pieces of paper produced per tree, at this rate we’ll have decimated a forest by the end of the year. Becides killing trees, but we’re also wasting our most precious resource—time. Flyering is a nuisance to do; it takes hours. With the amount of money and time we’d save by never flyering, Georgetown students could probably cure cancer, or at least fix Leo’s.
But aside from the economical and environmental concerns, I just hate seeing them. We live such busy existences, constantly bombarded by words constantly. We exist almost entirely in words these days, from e-mails to papers to books to Facebook to IM to texting—it becomes overwhelming. So many flyers becomes overwhelming too, to the point where individual things aren’t noticed in the mass of colored papers. I bet many students didn’t even notice the “Nocturnal Emisisons Collections Society” fliers that were on the side of Village A, seeing them as just that many more words in our already busy existences.
There is a Facebook application (I know, I know) called “Dramatic Whitespace,” which just does that – inserts some white space onto all these extra cluttered pages. And so I call for “dramatic brickspace” on some of these walls, a calming force in the midst of all we deal with, somewhere for our eyes to rest and not read, one tiny chance to not be asked to do something as I humbly scurry to the next class I’m late for. I’m not naïve enough to want to abolish a major publicity force altogether. But maybe, just maybe, a little less. One flyer, not a row of ten. Stand down on the publicity war. Make space, not flyers.
