What one does after a week without Twitter

Thankfully, my Twitter account has been unsuspended. Hooray!

After being suspended I promptly contested the suspension through Twitter’s support page. To tell you the truth, I kind of had high expectations of Twitters support team. I told myself someone would fire back a message rather instantaneously and I would be back in business. However, this was not the case.

After a day of my request sitting there with the status informing it was yet to be assigned to a support person I decided I best submit another. This time I used the ’support’ email address. Almost another day passed until I heard anything from them. I rejoiced at the new message from Twitter in my inbox, but opening it revealed all they were telling me is that they were deleting my ‘duplicate’ request so that my initial request may be ‘processed’ faster. The message told me the suspension could be a minimum of 30 days. Wtf? Would someone just please respond. Acknowledge you’ve got my request, even.

On day three I began commenting on my initial message. Each day my comments would become increasingly urgent.

It was around day four that I forgot what they had told me about submitting multiple requests. I submitted a bunch more…with words like HELP, and I’ve been WRONGLY SUSPENDED in large capitals. I even started a temporary account called @HelpImSuspended. I used this to message BiZ Stone himself, message @spam to tell them I’m NOT spam and to plea to anyone at all that I’d been wrongly suspended!

Anyways. One of these methods must have worked, because a lovely Twitter employee named ‘Ginger’ messaged me back on the seventh day of my famine to let me know she had unsuspended my account – Hallelujah!

I really believe that Twitter has been a useful tool for my project. It has allowed me access to participants I would have never otherwise had the chance to be in touch with. More importantly though, like many others, I have become quite reliant on Twitter as a stream of information and communication with particular friends, colleagues and scholars. A week without Twitter was not a minor deal in my life. Many of my friends joked about its insignificance. Rather, I was unable to consume information in the ways that I have become so accustomed.

But you know what the worst part about it all was!? After Twitter unsuspended my account….I thought that all the stuff I’d missed would just become visible in my homepage stream. This was not the case! Any tweets posted while I was suspended were not delivered. What’s more…any tweets directed at me (@alexdefreitas) during that time, were rejected! This was a big bummer. Especially because the day before I was suspended I had just sent a bunch of messages to potential new participants in my study.

So the answer to what one does when they are back after a week suspended from Twitter? Well, I manually went through all of the (important) profiles I follow and scrolled through catching up on what had been said. While time consuming, at least I could rest knowing that links shared….reports linked to…scholarly banter had not gone on without me.

Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter as a research tool. There are even conference workshops approaching that address microblogging like Twitter. I chose to use my personal account for my research as that is the way I would approach someone physically and ask them to take part in my study. I am not some far off researcher….just a person…another WiFi user. But I’m learning from the experience. My requests for people to participate started as a copy and pasted message. As it turns out…this is considered abuse of the @reply feature in Twitter’s terms and conditions. Now? well, I will have to make more of an effort to address people personally. This is fine, but it means the amount of people I can reach will drastically lower.

Needless to say. It’s been a fun experience this past year. Learning Twitter. Learning new cities. Learning ethnography. Justifying Twitter’s significance in the public realm and exploring the unseen ways we are going about our daily lives on mobiles and laptops. The more I think about it…the more I’m beginning to see first hand the ways in which the city is not a built, fixed, material thing….rather, a process, an experience…a performance.