Want To Get To Know Someone Better? Look At Their Laptop Stickers
Want To Get To Know Someone Better? Look At Their Laptop Stickers
Written by Colette Lauture
Art by Christina Casper
The last place I ever thought to look for clues about a person’s identity was in their laptop stickers.
I first had the idea one February evening in my Research Writing class. As was the routine, the class was having a discussion on a book we were reading. This time, it was Britt Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I was entranced by the blue-light glow of my MacBook Air, my eyes darting between a multitude of Google tabs: Docs, Drive, Mail; the typical college student setup.
Something in me prompted my eyes to look away from my screen and put my people-watching skills to good use. Though I should have been paying attention to my professor, who was writing a character analysis table on the whiteboard, I couldn’t help but notice that a majority of my classmates were under the same blue-light spell of their laptops. More importantly, in typical art school fashion, I noticed the fact that a host of stickers were plastered on the back of the illuminating glow.
It came to me that these stickers were an easter-egg-like, fragmented picture of each person’s identity. Without even knowing, you advertise a lot about who you are through the stickers on your laptop. After all, they are a personal reflection of you. Like snowflakes, no two sticker-covered laptops are the same. Putting stickers on your laptop is almost like creating a bio page on social media, except little to no words are involved. It’s revealing parts of yourself through a colorful collage. They also bring to life the one-dimensional, academically connoted gray box that is your laptop.
Pieces of Emerson were well represented across each laptop: WECB, EIV, the EVVYs, and Flawless Brown, to name a few. My observant brown eyes traveled from one too many multi-colored Boston stickers to a cobalt blue Florida sticker with an orange turtle lounging in the center. A Shenandoah National Park sticker with calm earth tones especially caught my gaze. I appreciated the variety of TV show, movie, and music stickers that inhabited laptops around the Walker classroom: an Appa sticker from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Pikachu from Pokémon, the Arctic Monkeys, Beyoncé. I especially took an interest in the randomness of some: a roller skate adorned with flowers, a hummingbird, a banana, the YETI water bottle logo. I fell further into the sticker-verse with each laptop I focused on.
In my further detective work of looking at my classmate’s laptop stickers, I began to notice a pattern of similar stickers migrating from MacBook to MacBook; fractions of an identity migrating along with them. For one, I noted several WECB stickers around the room, indicating the love of, or at least appreciation for, music and radio. Many of the same “Green Magazine” stickers made their presence known, giving me the idea that its owners were either somewhat environmentally conscious or like to write. I pointed out a couple of stickers with the word “WACK” on them, signifying their allegiance to the organization. I deduced that the owners of these stickers must have an appreciation for the company’s pillars of the arts and identity. Seeing so many of these clues helped me draw interesting connections between my classmates, just through stickers.
Graduating from connections between students in my class, I recognized connections between myself and others who shared the same stickers. My laptop is a personal victim of the sticker invasion: a Buffalo exchange cassette tape, a “choose kindness” quote, a large purple Emerson SOC logo, a Village Vinyl & HiFi logo, and a woman with an afro live on my years-old MacBook. Keeping my stickers in mind, I spotted a New Jersey zip code on a girl’s laptop across from my desk. Though I had barely talked to her, I felt a sense of camaraderie, us both being from the Garden State. I share the same blue and white Brookline Booksmith sticker with several other students, even my Research Writing professor—it’s nice to know that we all appreciate a good book. The Village Vinyl sticker I mentioned planted itself on many laptops I saw in the room (the inner music-head in me felt so appreciated). The power of observation was truly at work.
The next time you’re looking to start a new conversation with someone, take a peek at their laptop stickers. You may have more in common with that person than you thought.