Are bulletin boards obsolete?

In this era of technology and mass communication like facebook and twitter, one relic form of communication still exists, the bulletin board.  You can see them all over the world but they are very prevalent on college campuses.  They have been a staple of colleges around the world and are still widely used today.  On them you may find services, event announcements, and generally things to participate in on campus.  Although this form of communication remains to be popular it is not long until the technology for various forms of communication will take over leaving bulletin boards a thing of the past.

            Today websites like facebook, and twitter are very easy and quick ways of communicating the same message that bulletin boards can in a matter of seconds.  With a bulletin board you have to type whatever message you want to relay, then print it and walk to the bulletin board to post the message.  With a website like facebook or twitter you can easily write the message on a page and have everyone at the university see it without even leaving their room.  The other advantage of technology would be that it could be updated and changed very quickly.  You eliminate the process of walking to the board and posting the message.  Messages can also be received through mobile devices and students often receive messages through out the day on their phones.  Kelly Rakusin a junior at the University of Miami says, “ having facebook on my phone makes it a lot easier to find out when events are changed”.  While there is no shortage of bulletin boards on the University of Miami campus, their effectiveness among the students has declined with the rise of new media.  Nicole Thatcher at the university of Miami said, “I see tons of bulletin boards around campus but I never stop to look at them.  Everything I need is on my phone or the computer’.

            Nobody seems to look at bulletin boards so why are they still in use?  One reason may be that so many messages come through facebook everyday they start to become static and you do not bother to read all of them, where as a bulletin board has a limited amount of messages posted for a longer amount of time allowing the students to pick out which messages in particular they want to read.  Also, although many do not pay any attention to bulletin boards they are a tradition in college life and allow people who want to offer something within the campus community to do so using a tangible medium.  Students can stop by and take a glance at the bulletin board, or at the very least it provides an aesthetic look to the campus.