Editor’s Notebook: Embrace our shared geography, please do not let me die with stickers left over

It has been a quiet start to Christmas week here in Bloomington. Anyone still left in town is probably busy with something seasonally urgent, or is resting content that they have postponed their worries to January.

For me, it has been a chance to return to a monthslong meditation on an envelope full of B Square logo stickers that is sitting on my desk. It is an inescapable irony that the shape of the stickers is round.

I stuck one of them on my phone. I suppose I could plaster the rest on my laptop computer. But the original concept had been to disperse them throughout the community. The visual presence of the B Square logo out in the physical world might remind folks that The B Square is a place on the internet where they can read reports of news about the physical place they inhabit.

Sure, local journalism mostly happens on screens, but it is sustained by actual people who live in this place. Stickers are a small way of embracing that shared geography—something physical, passed from one person to another, with no analytics attached.

So there will be no online form, QR code, or any other digital gimmick connected to this spectacular sticker giveaway. The distributional approach will be proportionate to the scale of this operation. I will carry with me a plastic bag full of the remaining stickers. If you see me out in the world and say, “Hey Dave, gimme a sticker,” I will give you one.

Ideally, you are someone I do not know, and you don’t even introduce yourself before demanding a sticker. You just come up and say, “Hey Dave, gimme a sticker.” I would very much like that. (Please make sure it is me, before you command someone to give you a sticker. Our local police already have plenty to do.)

It would be a sad thing if, when I am laid to rest, the square stone that marks my grave has to read: “He died with stickers left in his bag.”