They’re everywhere. Stuffed into every nook and cranny, slotted under doorways, stashed into mailboxes, stacked on tabletops, pinned against bulletin boards, taped to bathroom stalls, and flung in fistfuls into the afternoon crowds streaming down Locust Walk. Post-it size to life-size. Plain or laminated. Flyers, the perennial campus decor at Penn.

Given this inundation of pocketable messages, Penn increasingly suffers from a surfeit of paper — and poor recycling capacities to handle it. Despite our efforts to promote a green campus, most of these colorful leaflets either end up in the trash and are shipped to the landfill,many simply litter the campus and clutter our living spaces.

Thankfully, the UA is promoting an electronic calendar initiative that will feature all campus events on one central, customizable calendar. It’s penance for the corny, now moldering campaign ads we have to put up with each year — some of which are still hanging on my house bulletin board. (Note: if you put it up, take it down).

You’d think, with the rise of the internet, that flyering would have died out. Yet it hasn’t. Across the country, newspapers and advertisers (especially spammers) have adopted new media and now offer electronic versions which cuts down on printing and distribution costs.

But let’s turn our focus back to campus. Think of all the alternatives out there: Chalk is infinitely more creative. Reusable banners are much more practical. Shouting messages is more compelling. Email is less resource-intensive. So why are flyers still around — and so pervasive?

Perhaps it the lack of a centralized electronic way to publicize activities. Groups use PennPortal, DP ads, or Facebook invites. Or maybe, out of sheer sentimentality, we still love our old-school bulletin boards and the Locust Walk tradition. But this is kind of silly. We all dodge the flyers on Locust Walk. What makes the daily spectacle great are the people and the live boom box music that animates the scene.

Most importantly, we risk inundating students with too much paper — too many calls for attention printed on armfuls of brightly colored scraps. In the age of environmentalism and electronics, let’s save some trees by becoming less reliant on paper.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.