Being @Spencerpratt

"Rob Wittig loves to find emerging venues of everyday communication and create fictional characters there. Mark C. Marino, when he is not masquerading as Spencer Pratt or Heidi Montag on social media . . . writes interactive stories and makes homemade pasta sauce in Los Angeles." 

"Netprov is an emerging category of performance art, taking place primarily on social media networks with participants collaborating to produce a shared and emergent narrative. However, when communicating online through serialized and dispersed platforms, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are less stable, and those who come in contact with netprov are not always aware that they are even readers in the first place. Reality: Being @spencerpratt unfolded when reality television star Spencer Pratt (already established on Twitter with nearly one million followers) agreed to allow Mark Marino and Rob Wittig to take over his account. Through his tweets, they told a story of star’s cell phone being lost, or perhaps stolen, and discovered by a struggling poet who takes over the account in order to use it as a platform to promote poetry. Unsure of whether this was fact or fiction, Pratt’s fanbase suddenly found themselves entangled in a world of Oulipian games and early modern English poetry. The result of this intervention into the quotidian life of a reality television celebrity with a lively group of followers is that Reality: Being @spencerpratt may be one of the most read and interacted with works of electronic literature (albeit in scattered glimpses of 140-character posts). This project calls into question the assumptions about authenticity and identity that take place on social media platforms. In the end, how different are the performative utterances of Being @SpencerPratt from those normally published from the 'verified' identity of @spencerpratt? Marino and Wittig’s repurposing of a celebrity identity offers a compelling example of the unreliable narrator in an age of social media and the unexpected reactions that this mode of digital storytelling can inspire when a tiny bubble of fiction is dropped into everyday life." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3