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:


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.

But then I suspect that many would say the same about Trent Reznor -- that he opened the disintermediation doors too wide, made himself too accessible and responsive to his fans, and now he's reaping what he's sown. And because, from a no-fan distance, I've respected the end-runs that he's been trying to make around the corporate music industry, here I'm biased to distrust that argument and want to reject it on principle.

And it strikes me that I generally don't see these kinds of dynamics play out on LJ-type services, except perhaps in the case of moderated LJ communities. So I wonder if the lateral, decentralized nature of LJ/DW/etc. mitigate against these conflicts, or at least insulate against their more destructive manifestations. Both Shakesville and Reznor-on-Twitter reflect more vertical, hierarchical community structures with their own centers, compared to the relative flatness of LJ/DW.

Of course, that's not the only difference; both Reznor and Shakesville seek money from their communities. And I don't want to valorize LJ/DW-style services as "best of all possible worlds" superior. Facebook, for example, has the same characteristics, and my guess is that builds in a similar resistance to Reznor/Shakesville-type drama.

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.