E-table tents: advertise like it's 1999

By Kushal Dave

Thirty dollars. That's the cost of the hundreds of photocopies one organization needs to table tent Yale's 12 dining halls and poster the kiosks provided for that purpose. Then there's the price of chalk for defacing Cross Campus and the ground in front of Lanman-Wright, as well as—for the truly adventurous—spray paint for defacing Berkeley's temporary blue walls. Want to run an ad in the YDN? Be ready to pony up some hefty cash. If your organization wants to get its message out effectively, it's going to cost you.

All this hassle and waste is completely unnecessary. The late 20th century has been graced with an invention called e-mail. This miraculous tool allows anyone to broadcast a message to countless others for zero cost.

Of course, most people still haven't figured out the best way to use e-mail. Some see potential for profit in transmitting messages such as "XXX 18-year-olds Do Everything You Want @ Hotsex.com," or "How to Make 10 Trillion Dollars in Just Two Seconds Thanks to the Internet." Or our "friends" hit us and 10 million of their other dearest buddies with cyber-snowballs, electronic smooches, chain letters portending damnation for non-forwarders, heart-warming Christian fanaticism, hopelessly shoddy David Letterman imitations, false virus warnings, and the URL of the mysterious Hamster Dance.

Here's a novel idea: why don't we transmit genuine information via this nifty tool? We already get pertinent messages from TAs telling us how to save our rears and from the Office of Public Affairs trying to cover Yale's. But an even better use would be to let undergraduate organizations send e-mails to the Yale student body.

Sadly, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg controls the master list of student e-mail addresses, and she doesn't believe in sharing it. In fact, she won't even answer e-mail suggesting such a possibility. What Trachtenberg doesn't seem to notice is that numerous trees, dollars, and hours could be saved by using e-mail instead of postering.

The only possible objections I see stem from a fear of abuse and cluttered mailboxes. Yet it takes just a fraction of a second to delete an unimportant e-mail. If nothing else, all the new e-mail would provide satisfaction for compulsive e-mail checkers. Consider how depressing it is to launch telnet and type your name and password, only to find out that you have no new messages. Trekking to the post office and not even finding ads for garden tools is depressing enough, but with e-mail so easy to send, it's a tragedy it doesn't pour in every few minutes.

In addition to providing recipients with the comfort of pseudo-popularity, e-mail campus publicity would bring enormous tangible benefits. The campus would look cleaner with fewer posters, and students would have more time to stop and consider the offers and messages of organizations. Looking at a poster while walking to a class or meal doesn't give you nearly enough time to read everything on a poster, and the odds of remembering anything you saw later on are pretty minimal. With e-mail we would get the summary of a play, the program of a concert, abstracts from an upcoming academic conference, or a link to the website of a club.

Information-packed e-mails could be arriving in all of our inboxes now if Trach-tenberg would just see the light. There could even be a limit—perhaps one e-mail per organization per month—to prevent hourly e-mails from your friends at the YPU or the like. Some secretary somewhere could even filter through them to make sure they're all kosher.

Considering the rising price of booze, money for Yale organizations is already limited, and forests are disappearing faster than Monica Lewinsky's clothes thanks to high-speed copiers. We must act now to end this trend and bring campus advertising into the 21st century.

Kushal Dave is a freshman in Pierson

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