Life Without Twitter Was Great for the First Few Hours

On Turkey’s Recent Twitter Ban

I discovered Twitter in 2007 when it became a news item on technology websites. I used to check those sites every morning like an obsessive bird watcher. I was writing the technology column at a Turkish newspaper and Twitter seemed like a story I could sell at the news meeting. After pitching it as the next big internet thing I realized—like many before me—that I had failed to answer questions about what exactly Twitter was. It was only two years later, while doing my military service in an Anatolian town filled with bird-song, that I learned Twitter had finally taken off in Turkey. Celebrities had made it their nest and fans followed. Journalists hid themselves behind avatar-shaped trees to listen to gossip, and found a lot of it. Turkey’s literati adapted to it, too, and the Turkish literary conversation began taking a new, twittery form.

In 2010, during a news meeting, I admitted to being a Twitter addict. A colleague said she wanted to pen an article about social media addiction and asked for volunteers who could help her. She created a team consisting of Facebook, Google, and Twitter addicts. She put us in a cab and brought us to a mental institution where we made a clean breast of our unhealthy fixation with our addictions.

I confessed that I couldn’t resist touching my timeline. Similar confessions were voiced from different corners of the clinic. In order to give an account of the severity of our addictions, we went onto a ten-day fast, and were only allowed to log onto our accounts after the issue hit the stand. The cover picture featured four of us standing in a police lineup. The headline read, “The Usual Addicts.”

I remembered that image two weeks ago when I found myself deprived of Twitter—only this time it was not because of an experiment, but a court order. When reports about the Twitter shutdown appeared on my timeline in the form of late-night tweets, I thought they were exaggerated. Checking a timeline late at night is an experience similar to visiting a bar after hours, and I found it strange to hear from fellow barflies that the bar was being locked down as we sat behind the counter. My initial reaction was disbelief. Twitter was a natural force, like the rain. It could not be stopped.

But it could, and was stopped when Turkish courts successfully captured the bird, put it in a cage and by morning, Twitter was, well, not dead but a bit flabbergasted. To hear it sing again, old addicts like me had to learn shortcuts. The easiest way to get around the...