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.

When Technology Lets Us Down...

For my inaugural blog post in my Web 2.0 course (#eme6414) I am actually going to be writing about what happens when technology fails us. I am a social media neophyte and just beginning my journey into this brave new world of social networks. I’ve taken some rather small steps in this journey that only a few years ago were considered giant leaps for the industry.

I have thus far resisted jumping on the social media bandwagon but I appear to be embarking on a slippery slope. Up until last month, my social media footprint would have barely registered on the scale with some minimal Facebook activity that coincided with my kids being born; the youngest is now 8, so suffice it to say it has collected a bit of dust over the years. I now have a LinkedIn account and I’m getting started with Twitter; two platforms that I knew existed but had never considered joining.

To round out the social media trifecta, I attempted to create my very first Instagram account this afternoon. Ironically this was actually for another class I am taking this summer (#eme5608) and had the intent of facilitating some informal social interaction among classmates within the online course. I downloaded the app from the Apple app store and watched as the blue circle completed its 360 degrees of travel and transformed into an open button. With a bit of excitement I launched the app and dutifully entered my email address to create my account. It then asked for my name and a password - check. I couldn’t think of anything clever at the time so I stuck with the only name I was given and crafted an elaborate password to protect my account. I clicked next to confirm a username and was greeted by an unexpected error message politely informing me that my account had been disabled for violating their terms. What!? How could that be? All I was trying to do was sign up for an account.

The pop-up provided an option to learn more about my offending actions and according to the help article that followed, some of the things that aren’t allowed are:

“…artificially collecting likes, followers or shares, posting repetitive content or repeatedly contacting people for commercial purposes without their consent.”

I had done none of these things, even if I wanted to (though I admit I haven’t the slightest clue as to how one would go about artificially collecting likes). I hadn’t even made it passed the sign-up screens to engage in any sort of nefarious activity.

Convinced I somehow made a mistake during those three steps, I attempted to create another account using a different email address, following those words of wisdom, “If at first you don’t succeed…” I’m now batting 0 for 2. Apparently there is just something about me that violates Instagram’s terms. I read the help article again and found a link to let Instagram know I thought my account had been disabled by mistake. After answering a couple questions and providing my account name and email I hit send and fired my S.O.S. off into cyberspace. I received an auto-generated reply moments later seeking to confirm that I was in fact the owner of the disabled account. Obviously, Instagram is concerned about securing your personal information, but I had never seen a request quite like the one I received to prove my identity:

I sent off my mugshot and waited for a reply. With each passing hour, my feelings turned from unexpected inconvenience to increasing frustration. I searched the help articles to try and decipher what had gone wrong but they were of little help in my situation. I looked for a chat feature to talk with someone and explain my innocence, but there was no such option. A Google search revealed a promising phone number but warned that it would be unlikely to receive any response through that channel. Sure enough, an automated voice recording apologized that she was unable to provide phone support for most situations and instead directed me to the help section on the website.

As I conceded defeat and waited for an email to arrive in my inbox that would hopefully clear my account of any wrongdoing, I started to wonder why a social media platform like Instagram, built on fostering connections through visual storytelling, was so hard to connect with in this time of need. These new technologies make wonderful claims, but what happens when they break down? I think we have a tendency to overlook how much we rely on these platforms to keep us connected with one another until they fail. Obviously we survived without these recent conveniences of modern technology. Instagram has only been around since 2010. Twitter made its debut in 2006, just two years after Facebook was unveiled. But these tools have become ingrained in the fabric of everyday communication and for some, a fixture in their daily routines. When these tools fail, we can be left feeling lost and disconnected. Granted my current dilemma is not the same as if I was well established on social media and experienced a sudden disruption in service, but it is enough to give me pause to consider the implications of our hyper-connected society. In the meantime I’ll continue to wait for a reply from the Instagram gatekeepers but I think I’ll hang on to my hard copy photo albums just a little while longer.