Little Fliers Everywhere
They’re not just for missing pets or yard sales. Fliers these days are for internet memes, self-promotion and extremely esoteric messages.
By T.M. Brown
Photographs by Dolly Faibyshev
On a sunny afternoon this summer, Natalie Shine was hanging neon pink fliers around the West Village. Tracing the path between her apartment, her yoga studio and her regular coffee shop, Mrs. Shine scanned the sidewalk for empty lampposts to advertise her popular internet game show, The Big Silly Trivia Game.
“We aim to hang them about the average woman’s height,” said Mrs. Shine, adding that her audience is almost exclusively female.
There was not a ton of available space. The street corners in Mrs. Shine’s neighborhood were covered in sheets of computer paper with various messages. Not just that a cat was lost or that a moving company’s services were available but, for instance, that there was a contest to search for people who looked like the comedian Matt Rife, or a speed-dating event specifically for bisexual people.
Despite the clutter, a flier was a better bet for finding eyeballs than posting online, Mrs. Shine, 27, reasoned.
“People are so used to scrolling right past ads on their phones,” she said. “You have to give them a reason to stop.”
In the war for attention, social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become places where everyone is plugging or hawking something: a brand collaboration, a reading series, a podcast. It has become fatiguing for many young people, who spend much of their time online yet crave an escape hatch out into the material world. (It has also become a source of frustration for those who themselves want to plug projects they feel are getting lost in the digital tide of information.)
They have embraced analog music, print magazines and film cameras in a nostalgic turn toward tactility and authenticity. Fliers seem to have become a new way to get to those feelings — though many of the most eye-catching ones of late refer back inexorably to the logic of the internet. Still, unlike online memes, fliers require finding a printer and then hoofing it around town to paste them up.
“Over the last year, we’ve seen probably triple the amount of projects,” said Sergio Gusella, a staff member at the Printing Garage in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. “People are printing everything.”
Some fliers are straightforward invitations to parties. Then there’s the meta: “Need to Get the Word Out? I Post Your Flyers,” advertised one in Manhattan. Others offer esoteric messages and mysterious prompts. “Got a rat story?” a flier in Williamsburg read, beckoning readers to email a movie studio.
“They’re like these little distress signals sent into the world, and you have no idea if anyone will respond,” said Hua Hsu, a staff writer at The New Yorker who also publishes a zine called Suspended in Time.
People have been taping up fliers for decades, of course. Before the age of Instagram cards, Eventbrite and Partiful, it was one of the most reliable — and one of few — ways to tell a lot of people that something was going on.
Adrian Bartos recalled checking out the Columbia University campus bulletin board as a student in the 1990s to find out which bands were performing where.
As for him, he preferred to hand out his fliers in person, promoting his hip-hop D.J. sets. He made them out of cardboard and glue.
“Back then, that was how you got the word out and how you got people to come to parties,” said Mr. Bartos, better known as D.J. Stretch Armstrong.
Today’s fliers have practicality in mind, too. But many of them are written in the language of the internet and are designed to pop on Instagram and TikTok.
Unless you are deeply versed in internet speak — and even if you are — the messages on Viv Chen’s fliers, which she posts around Berkeley, Calif., are somewhat impenetrable. “Are You a Fermented Art Hoe?” one read.
A QR code below the provocative question directed the reader to Ms. Chen’s Substack, The Molehill. The descriptor was something Ms. Chen had thought up while working on an article for the newsletter.
She had walked the aisles of the Berkeley Bowl, an organic grocery store, and started categorizing the fashion trends she observed; the “clog moms” in the bread aisle, the “linen vegans” in the legume section. Those archetypes were just off-kilter and internet addled enough to be enticing, Ms. Chen said.
“There are people who look at the fliers and think: ‘This is weird. Let me scan it,’” she said.
“There’s probably a Gen Z audience shopping at Berkeley Bowl now,” she added. “This is the kind of language they speak.”
The conversion of online memes to printed matter has its obvious ironies. One flier in Williamsburg compelled passers-by to “touch grass,” a brusque command lobbed at people glued to their devices. The flier’s QR code led to an event invite hosted by a middle-aged TikTok influencer named John Chungus, who had found modest internet fame by filming videos of himself touching grass, literally.
Grace Carrington, a designer at Parker Design Associates, an interior design firm in Atlanta, said she recently put up some fliers around the city teasing a rebrand and a new website. Then she posted photos of them, in situ, on social media.
“I felt like taping up physical fliers but making a TikTok out of them was an effective way of advertising our refresh,” she said.
Some of the appeal of fliers is in their “friction,” said Jessa Lingel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who researches digital culture. The rise of online content created by artificial intelligence, Ms. Lingel said, has led to a collective anxiety about whether or not what someone is looking at is even real.
“There’s this grasping for what authenticity even looks like right now,” she added. “With fliers, someone had to tape it up — a human had to be involved somewhere.”
But how authentic is it if these days fliers seem to be deployed most often to self-advertise? Well, as Rachel Karten, a social media consultant, pointed out, that would be relatively in line with the same purpose they served decades ago, before our digital age.
“Fliers are just sort of the original ad,” she said. “That’s sort of going back to where we started.”
Claire Jia started taping up ads for her novel “Wanting” around Los Angeles before its release this summer. The city is not known for being friendly to pedestrians, but she has found spots with reliable foot traffic: the dog park in Silver Lake, Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz, major intersections in Culver City where the wait for a walk sign can seem interminable.
“People get bored waiting to cross,” she said. “I figured I’d give them something to read.”
As she continues to try to sell copies of her book, she has become more strategic with her fliers. She brings a stack to book signings and readings to hang nearby, hypothesizing that people walking around a bookstore would be more likely to buy a novel.
Sometimes she leaves handwritten directions on the fliers: “I would write, ‘My book is available in that bookstore — the one right next to you!’” Ms. Jia said.
Some have deployed fliers in pursuit of in-person connection.
In 2023, feeling isolated in New York, Lilly Hogan decided to hang a few hundred fliers throughout the city with a simple question: “Do you want to make more friends?”
The prompt — and medium — resonated. “Loneliness in cities has become this accepted background condition we’re all supposed to just manage privately,” she said. “There’s this assumption that you should just naturally have friends as an adult, and when you don’t, you’re not supposed to talk about it.”
She deliberately hung the fliers in different neighborhoods she frequented and in areas where she could see herself hanging out. The intention, she said, was to find people outside her own social circle and not depend on the internet to create human connections.
“Social media is just a giant ad now,” she said. “I didn’t want this to just be people wanting to be my friend based on how I look or who I know.” She also figured she might make some sort of project out of the responses.
Going analog worked: Ms. Hogan said dozens of people wrote in, sharing stories about their own sense of isolation in the city. She ended up interviewing 24 of them and taping the conversations for a podcast, which she called Lilly Friend Project. She has remained in touch with two of her interview subjects.
As she has gotten her podcast off the ground, Ms. Hogan couldn’t help but see the advertising potential of fliers, too. This year, she began hanging up some with a simple message: “Please listen to my podcast!”
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