Ever since my dream that I was trapped on The Hills, I've mostly been avoiding Twitter, not posting and only checking it once a day. Last night I had a dream in which I was getting ready to go to work in the morning, and as I was about to leave my apartment I discovered that all of the locks on my door had been removed, including the chain and the deadbolt.

My first thought in the dream was that someone had taken them off in middle of the night while I was sleeping. But then I realized (again, in the dream) that the locks could have only been removed from inside of the apartment, and nobody could have gotten in while I was asleep, so I must have somehow done it myself. Upon waking, my first thought was that this, too, is a Twitter anxiety dream.

It seems like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has also been going through some social media anxiety viz. Twitter:
( warning: offensive to fangirls of all sizes and those who love them: )
Um, wow, Trent. But the rest of his forum post is worth reading. He's been a huge pioneer and advocate for online music distribution and social media, so when he pulls back from Twitter, it takes on more weight than your typical flounce.

I can't help but read this in the context of recent events on the feminist group blog Shakesville, which Sady from Tiger Beatdown posted about here; see also this post from The Apostate). Personally I've never really been a fan of Shakesville, and don't read it regularly; when I do follow links to it, I've tended to find the in-jokes and invocations of community increasingly off-putting. That definitely biases me towards wondering how much of their recent problems are a direct consequence of both the personalities involved and their particular way of claiming and promoting themselves as a community.

( also I really hate that teaspoon thing, but moving right along )

And maybe there's something here about the difference between building social networks vs. online communities. But I don't think that Reznor's pitch (echoed by Techcrunch) for verified identities or the demarcation by Shakesville's Melissa McEwan of "safe space" necessarily get to the root of the dynamics in play here.