What if your social media posting and liking, instead of being for fun, was your job?

Or rather, what if you realized that it was work and you just weren’t getting paid for it?

From Jan 1- Jan 26th, @spencerpratt’s Twitter account written by an unknown British poet who had found Spencer’s phone. Turns out he was the main character in a new netprov that Rob and I collaborated on. Through the fictional tale of this obscure poet broadcasting from a Reality star’s account, we explored themes of fame, language play, and what it means to be real.

The storyline:

The story began when Spencer lost his mobile phone while in London. On January 1, Heidi tweeted:
Another wild NYE! So wild Spencer can’t find the new phone I got him for Christmas.

It’s probably in the hotel, but since we’ve been here, we’ve seen:

Big Ben, London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, went ice skating, and played in red phone booths and taxis.

So basically he could’ve lost it anywhere in the UK.

@spencerpratt’s next tweets were:

Testing…Testing….
OMG!
Woh.
Yes, cheers, everyone, this is actually Spencer Pratt.
And I am married to Heidi Montag. Wow.

Spencer sounded different. He knew an awful lot about poetry all of the sudden, including asking followers for bookshop recommendations in London and correcting Twitter followers on their knowledge of haikus. When he went into CBB, however, he kept tweeting. How was this possible? At first he claimed he had found his phone and had been allowed as a plot twist on the new season of CBB, but when CBB producers denied that claim, it became apparent someone had his phone and wanted to sell it.

Over the next few days, the phone thief or lucky bloke released a series of “intimate” photos of Heidi showing off her gorgeous mani-pedi, flirting with Gandalf, and showing off her enormous stack of laundry.

When the phone finder couldn’t sell the mobile in England, he exposed himself as an obscure British poet who was dying to promote his literary career but could never do that out of fear of being arrested. Tempspence, as he was dubbed, began playing poetry games with Spencer’s followers and fending off accusations that he was a thief.

Tempspence took his Spencer name seriously, telling the story of his own romantic life with Una and Duessa, characters in Rennaisance-poet Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Following the Big Brother format, followers voted which woman he would try to pursue by ReTweeting.

Here are the games
#prattplus7: replace each noun in a famous Spencer Pratt quote with the noun 7 later in the dictionary.
#twouplets: (Twitter couplets) rhyme your tweet with someone else’s.
#centode: Tweet about your boyfriend or girlfriend for a collective poem.
#shibboleth: type a tweet or post a doodle that people could use to prove it’s you.
#ekphrastic: describe yourself in a revealing picture
#imspencer: type a line you want to hear coming out of @spencerpratt’s mouth
#myccb: describe the people you live with as though they were the CBB housemates
#jungbro: describe your personality as made up of CBB participants

At some point, someone dubbed the character Tempspence and it stuck. The group of tweeps that showed up each morning (London time) to play poetry games became the PTempspence poets and they will be living on as @tempspence, a new twitter account.

Sarah-Anne Joulie (Canada) (@SarahAnneJoulie) and Chloe Smith (NZ) (@ChloeSmith0603) are two of the tempspence poets who first met playing one of tempspence games called #twouplets where tweeters rhymed with each other’s tweets.