Help has arrived!

Thanks to a good Samaritan along the information superhighway (remember that from way back in 1993, when our best metaphor for the burgeoning Internet was a multi-lane vehicular thoroughfare? My how the times have changed!) I was able to successfully create my first Instagram account. I decided to create a completely new Gmail account in the hopes that it would not be tied to my previous attempts and be guilty by association. I also created the account from their website on my laptop instead of the app on my iPhone. It worked! I had made it past the gatekeepers and I was in.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the Instagram Team that promised to help me as long as I could prove I was the owner. That’s okay; at this point I’m not expecting anyone to get back to me, although it would be nice to know what had gone awry just out of curiosity. It was frustrating not being able to reach out to someone in the moment and get a resolution to my problem and I felt neglected by the people who should be there to provide support as I waited for a reply to my email. As I scrolled through page after page of help articles that couldn’t help me I found myself getting angry. First at my inability to fix the problem on my own. I don’t consider myself a tech guru by any means, but I feel fairly comfortable about computers and have fixed many problems on my own in the past. This problem was above my pay grade, which meant I was at the mercy of outside assistance and the loss of control is always a difficult feeling to wrestle with. But then my anger turned toward Instagram and their seeming unwillingness to render assistance. I’d been abandoned on the side of the superhighway without so much as a map or road sign in sight.

Support did eventually arrive, but not from Instagram. My support came in the form of a fellow user, like me, who had a similar experience and more importantly had found a successful fix. I was able to solve my problem the way many people do in the age of Web 2.0, by appealing to the masses and posting a message for help in a discussion board. Five hours later I not only had a viable plan of action but also a glimmer of hope knowing that I wasn’t the only one to be wrongfully accused by Instagram and beat the rap. This is something truly unique that the rise of Web 2.0 and social media have ushered in: the sense of camaraderie and shared experience; the feeling that you are not alone, that others have been in your shoes or are right there with you. I didn’t know the person who answered my post, but they responded nonetheless. For all the negatives that can be said about social media, this is one area in which it shines and it reminds us that we’re all in this together.

With my email to the Instagram Team I was waiting for help from maybe a handful of people - the company only had 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook in 2012. With my single discussion board post my number of possible responses easily doubled that. Plus, it wasn’t just the people in class that could help me, but any experiences from their network of friends and contacts they could share as well. It’s like the difference between cupping your hands around your mouth and shouting “help” at the top of your lungs and radioing “mayday” over Ch. 16 VHF.  The tangled web of connections built by these social networks is ever expanding and with that growth, the ease and speed of tapping into the right connection increases.  Thanks to this experience, I am now one more link in a long chain of connections and one day, I hope to help someone else looking for some guidance along the information superhighway.