Twitter is Ruining Bathroom Graffiti

If you use Twitter, you already know exactly what I’m talking about: people tweet the most when they poop. You’re not going anywhere for a while, you have your phone but no other means of entertaining yourself, and you’re pooping, which is the most philosophical moment of human existence. 

It’s a time to ponder what exactly it means to be man. Sure, man invented flight, put a man on the moon, and accidentally discovered penicillin. We wrote The Great Gatsby and recorded The Black Album. But we also poop. At the end of the day, we're just animals. Animals with a lot of time to think while we sit in our little stalls. 

It’s a time-honored tradition to take these wisps of thoughts tumbling around in our head and literally write them on the bathroom wall. These dump-haikus are there for posterity, saved for generations of fecal followers. And there really are some gems on those walls. See the picture above for reference of one. It even uses audience participation!

Twitter’s changing the landscape. Now, instead of taking out a Sharpie and writing your thoughts on the wall, you’re taking out your iPhone and writing them on your feed. 

Here are my issues with this:

1) Text-only. Drawings, especially of certain anatomical parts, are a big part of bathroom graffiti. Twitter doesn't really support that. 

2) Lack of permanence. Sure, tweets are technically there forever, but once they fall on the feed, they’re essentially dead. 

3) Exclusivity. You decide who to follow on Twitter, so if you don’t like the 140 characters somebody shits out, you can decide not to follow them. The bathroom walls are forced on you. Sorry, but sometimes you gotta go, and then you make for the nearest philosophy cubicle and drop trou. 

4) Price. Even if you don’t have a smartphone (or any phone!) you can still write on the walls. 

5) Handwriting/color/size. You can’t personalize a tweet the way you can bathroom graffiti. 

6) Anonymity. Twitter accounts at least have a handle name. Nobody knows who wrote what in the stall. That makes it timeless. Solomon the Wise could have written that haiku on the stall wall. You never know. 

You get the point. I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I’m not saying to abandon Twitter. Just maybe next time you have something hilarious to say, go old-fashioned with it and draw it on the walls instead.