Time to bring back the bathroom magazine rack!
You know the horror story. Person goes to use the restroom, absentmindedly pulls their smartphone out to watch a TikTok or two… or fifty, or otherwise scroll through social media, and then when they pull their pants back up and go to flush the toilet…
PLONK!!
The horror sets in as the aforementioned person realizes that their $500+ phone has not only fallen into water, but — yuck!! — water filled with urine and, if they are particularly unlucky, feces. Smartphones nowadays may be waterproof, but nothing would ever be able to shake my disgust at what germs it may have mixed with when it fell into the toilet.
It wasn’t always this way, though. For many years growing up, I remember going to friends’ houses and using bathrooms furnished with magazine racks. Sometimes the magazines were old, and to be sure, I don’t expect them to be germ-free given their proximity to the toilet. But it was at least a safer way of passing the time spent there (though, if you spend too much time in the restroom for non-smartphone related issues, might I recommend a laxative?).
The fact that we pull out our smartphones in the ole commode may just be a result of the same boredom that caused us to pick up one of those magazines in the pre-smartphone days. Yet I also can’t help but shake that it may be due to technology addiction. Indeed, given how often we pull our phones out of our pockets without even thinking outside of the restroom leads me to believe that our disposition to do so within the W.C. may just be an extension of that already-present addiction.
There is another factor in my reasoning here. In most cases, the magazines consisted of well-reasoned and informative articles. Yet, even the most edifying story must eventually come to an end, where we could take the cue that we are done, wipe ourselves, and exit (just make sure you wash your hands!). Nowadays, it is the norm to have “endless scrolling”, where you can never reach the end of your news feed or videos related to the one you’re watching. So you scroll, and scroll, and scroll…
The next thing you know, you’ve been in the restroom for half an hour, and your coworkers or friends are either wondering if everything is okay, or, alternatively, may be so hyperfocused on their own screens that they don’t even realize how long you’ve been gone. Technology and social media addiction are part of why I have left Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and I believe all these platforms are doing awful things to us on an individual scale as well as a societal scale (I will write more about these concerns in a future post). Those friends who I mentioned might be so enthralled by their screens? They were supposed to be hanging out with you in person.
So I say it’s time to bring back the bathroom magazine rack! I don’t plan on becoming a Luddite, nor would I expect any of my readers to, but I do think that it is time to reassess our relationship with technology and the time — both in terms of quantity and quality — we spend on it. Who knows? Once you do the same, you might just think twice about endangering your phone on the toilet — and maybe even wish you had a magazine rack there the next time nature calls.
