It all started with a text message from my insta-addict friend Scott. "Hey, why did you unfollow me?"
Perplexed, I opened the Instagram app on my iPhone to see the login screen. Kind of weird, I thought, as it has always just been logged in. But I didn't think too much about it and entered the same screen name I use for everything: @bwhyte11.
Then it happened: "User Not Found".
This is probably the moment to point out that I've only ever been a casual user of Instagram. I joined a few years back, but maybe only posted five or so photos in that time. The last one around a month or so ago, just before Christmas. Unlike Scott, it's not a part of my life.
The photos I posted were boring at best, inoffensive to the extreme. Artfully composed shots of my chicken caesar salad, that sort of thing. Insta-porn they were not. I had around 400 followers, but most of them were Facebook friends of mine who used "Find My Friends" when setting up their accounts.
Back to the story. I then did what anyone would do and used the "Forgot my Password" link, where I entered @bwhyte11. Then when that was not recognised, I started to think something might be up. I used the alternative option of reseting my password using e-mail and entered my usual address. "User Not Found". Then I tried my work e-mail address, my old student e-mail address, my Yahoo Mail address from years and years ago... but there didn't seem to be any trace of me.
I had vanished.
I searched through all my e-mail accounts for any notifications from Instagram. I assumed my account had perhaps been deactivated for some reason or other. Maybe someone found my Chicken Ceaser Salad pics offensive and reported them. That sort of stuff happens. But there were no messages from Instagram, no notifications of a suspended account. There was nothing.
I hadn't been deactivated. I had disappeared.
I then had a sick feeling in my stomach. Not because I had tonnes of memories on Instagram that were now lost in a digital vortex (thank goodness) or because Instagram was important to my life. I won't miss it in the slightest. I guess I just felt violated.
I went to my Instagram URL and there was literally no trace that I ever existed.
Was I going mad? For a brief second, I wondered if I was being utterly delusional and that maybe I never even had an Instagram account. But as we all know, for better or worse there is one web service that deletes nothing, and that's Google. Thankfully my Instagram account still showed up in Google search results. This gave me a bit of reassurance that I wasn't a crazy man.
I wanted my account back, so I thought I'd contact Instagram customer support. Except there's one problem with that. It doesn't exist. There's only an FAQ which doesn't have "I've just been erased from history" as an option.
Unlike sister company Facebook, which has an extensive support team on hand to handle account queries (albeit with varying levels of usefulness), Instagram is much more bare bones. Famously they employed only 13 people at the time of the Facebook acquisition. After much googling I found an Instagram contact form. I also tweeted them. But as you may have guessed, five days later I still don't have a reply.
Why does this bother me? You mean, I never really used Instagram that much anyway.
Here's why it irks me. Social media is now integral to our relationships with friends and the wider community. Not only are our day to day lives facilitated by apps such as Instagram, but they are where many of us end up archiving of our memories, replacing the photo album or journal we may have kept in yesteryear.
What if my Instagram was actually a photo collection of my new-born baby snaps, stored in the Insta-cloud alongside well wishes from my family and friends. Those memories would be lost forever with no recourse. I can't even speak to someone about it or find a way of getting them back. This really disturbs me.
In times gone by, the postal service was considered so integral to our connections with other people, most governments had a Postmaster-General sitting in their cabinet.
Now, I'm not for a minute suggesting state control of social media, but there needs to be a recognition of the heavy responsibilities social media owners have when they help facilitate some of the most important interactions in our lives.
For us as users, we must learn to balance the convenience of using social media platforms with the reality of assigning control over that element of our life to Facebook or Instagram via their service agreements. Increasingly, we're giving ownership of deeply personal moments in our lives to social media giants. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but we need to find a way of keeping a backup. Because if they decide to delete it, there's really nothing we can do.
Incidentally, just in case you're wondering how Scott knew I had 'unfollowed' him in the first place, it's because he uses a service called 'unfollowgram.com'. Yup, he's that much of an Insta-geek. If one day he woke up and found his account was erased from history, it would break his little insta-heart.
So that's why I'm hoping someone at Instagram will see this piece and try to unpick what happened. So that my good friend Scott never has to suffer an insta-heartbreak.