Right, own up! Who’s been writing graffiti on the bathroom wall? Was it you Fry?

Peter Gabriel wrote a song called Games without Frontiers in which he cast countries as kids punching the daylights out of each other and nicking each others’ sweets in the playground. It’s a good metaphor. No one ever grows up. And just like those un-grown-ups, children forever find new ways and places for communicating.

Inky notes passed under the desk – Janice smells like a squirrel – grow up into Email, and probably carrying much the same kind of message. Social networks like Facebook have the feel of the gang den in the bushes: tin-can hanging from a branch and a packet of wet matches under a log. So what was the proto-Twitter back in high school? What was the stubby, misspelled, deeply private and scandalously public shortform of the fourth form? It was the wall. The writing was on the bathroom wall then, just as it is today. Kilroy was here.

The relationship model is the key to social networks. First it was just friends that you were expected to collect like pokemon. Then Diggers. Then Redders, who presumably couldn’t read. But who knew that what the world really needed would be a social network to cater for those whose inner Messiah was feeling a bit held back? Twitter makes runes out of rubbish. On the spur of the moment the flex of a wingtip can be enough to switch the whole flock hurtling in a new direction. This dynamic, as shown in the Life of Brian, quickly ensures the swarming suffocation of the one being followed: hermit drops shoe and the exponentially growing mob explodes, “IT’S A SIGN!!!!”

I’m going to make a prediction (and I promise I’ve not checked): my guess is that Douglas Hofstadter doesn’t Twitter, while Richard Dawkins does. Hofstadter – author of Godel, Escher, Bach and more recently I Am a Strange Loop – sees What-Constitues-You as considerably more than You yourself. Dawkins on the other hand sees the world as something he is obliged to shape in his own image. For such a zealous atheist as the author of The God Delusion, it’s probably the dead whiff of the seminary on Twitter – Thou shalt Follow Fewer than the Number of Thine Own Followers – that strikes a deep and sympathetic chord.

So hands up. Did you ever write graffiti on the bathroom wall at your school?

Yes: you Twitter. Never: you don’t.