On the bulletin board of the common room in my dorm, there are usually many, many fliers. Fliers, and fliers, and yes more fliers. Underneath those fliers there are little slips of paper devoted to each month of the year recording the birthdays of my dorm mates for each month. There used to be a dorm directory up there as well. The residents of North College need to shift and dig through fliers to find these personal documents.

Where else can someone put a flier besides the dorm bulletin boards? There is the passageway into Valentine Hall, with layers upon layers of information obscuring each other. I've also had the shock of seeing fliers in the bathroom, where they provide some nice reading material (though I find it a bit disquieting that it is always the most disturbing fliers, usually about violence that has been done or will be done to women). In both cases, fliers are an effective way of spreading information.

The aggressiveness of the medium, though, can couch a surely deserving message in annoyance. The big pink "Dr. Ira Silver" poster stapled over the June and April birthdays does not endear the event to the denizens of North. The layers of posters in the walkway into Valentine Hall creates confusion and an information overload. I find the day-organized system in Keefe much more handy. Or there is always the method of putting posters up on the wall with tape, but then the paint peels off and the dorm just ends up with a lot of anger, not to mention dorm damage.

These tagging wars played mainly by clubs are off-putting, and do not evoke a lot of goodwill. One would hope that it would be easy enough for some courtesy to be put into practice. However, one cannot simply expect that to work; also, putting up fliers is a solo, anonymous job that is not easily monitored. Overnight, the bright pieces of paper seem to spring up like omnipresent mushrooms shouting for your attention. Punitive measures are, therefore, simply not viable, since there is no clear sign of who is responsible for the hanging of a particular piece of paper.

Perhaps the dorm perhaps needs two bulletin boards: one for campus-wide announcements and one for dorm affairs. Another idea is for those hanging fliers to exercise some common sense when choosing where they put their paper; they should also travel with their own push pins (instead of stealing them from other announcements). Still, that is not going to solve everything since the sheer glut of information makes board space a hot commodity.

In the end, the only option open is for clubs to try and use more alternate places to put up their ads. The bathrooms are a good start. Doors also work particularly well, though watching someone try to read a flier in mid swing is not a graceful sight. I like the idea of hanging up fliers by keypads as well. All you Amherst clubs out there, just remember that the nicer you are, the more we'll want to go to your events.

Greenberg can be reached at rgreenberg09@amherst.edu