Trent Reznor is a big, scary dude. Best known as the man behind Nine Inch Nails, as well as having tackled a major addiction to drugs and alcohol in the mid-’90s, he decided to set up, in late 2008, a twitter account. “Hanging on the bus,” he announced. He started using the short-message service seriously starting in January 2009, initially monologuing about the tour he was on, but soon he was holding contests for ticket giveaways and promoting various charity works, and, almost incidentally, humanizing himself.
If you’re looking for a pet, consider rescuing a greyhound. I have two and they’re awesome (and slightly insane!)
hahaha, nice one crew guys… hahahahaaaa haaaaaaaaa YOU’RE ALL FIRED.
This ‘being madly in love’ thing is weird. Feels bad being apart.
After using twitter for a while, Trent explained in a post on his website that he had started his twitter because he wanted to “lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality.”
I joined Twitter about six months before Reznor did, initially to follow one of my favorite writers, who had just set up an account of his own. I didn’t quite understand the point of twitter at first — why would anyone want to force themselves to talk only in 140 character snippets?
Part of the problem was that I was using it wrong, because I was focused only on listening instead of dialoguing with other users. For another thing, the tools which make twitter really usable didn’t exist yet. It took a good three months before it clicked for me.
“It’s a new means of interacting with and entertaining fans,” says Jeph Jacques, author and artist of the popular webcomic Questionable Content (a relationship comic about 20-somethings living in New England) and prolific twitter user.
He maintains not only his personal account for communicating with “fans and friends and colleagues,” but also maintains twitter accounts for ten of the characters from his comic, as well as a comedy account called Yelling Bird, which is “simultaneously my id, a loving homage to the webcomic Jerkcity, and one of my favorite characters I’ve ever come up with. He is my pressure release valve.” The account posts offensive images and all-caps sexually-explicit statements, generally involving the reader’s genitalia in some fashion. “It’s fun to use twitter as a performance space! It’s another means for me to entertain my audience, and the bigger that audience gets the more fun it is, for me, to do things they will find funny or weird or whatever.”
I’m addicted to twitter now, and have it always open on my computer desktop. It was one of the motivations for me to buy an expensive new smartphone at the end of last year: I wanted to be able to tweet on the go, as things happened to me, as opposed to recapping in three or four posts at the end of the day. I follow 175 people, and receive anywhere from five hundred to a thousand tweets a day, and am closing in on 10,000 tweets posted.
Twitter itself has grown into a cultural juggernaut over the past few years, with major trend-setters and thought-leaders from many fields either setting up automated promotional accounts — such as the ‘one deal, one day’ web store woot.com, or CNN’s breaking news feeds — or engaging more directly with fans and interested parties — like the author Neil Gaiman, or rapper P. Diddy, or the man who introduced millions of Americans to twitter during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama.
“I get the occasional snarky comment or rude person, but by and large my replies are positive. It seems like a lot of the people who catch flak on Twitter are also the people who respond to the flak, which then empowers the guys giving it, which only encourages them and others to do more of it.” Jacques’ main, personal account has just 31,000 followers, compared to Reznor’s 600,000. Not all of Reznor’s encounters on twitter, which has no checks on account creation or verification, meaning anyone can sign up for an account instantly and begin messaging other accounts, were as positive as Jacques’.
Reznor began to catch flack from some of the stranger members of his fan-base, which he referred to as “the Metal Sludge contingency” in his farewell rant on his website. “Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I’ve ever come across. It’s populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. [...] It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn’t stop there – hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are.”
Part of the problem stemmed from his support of the fundraising efforts of then-CNN anchor Veronica De La Cruz for her brother Eric, who was dying of heart failure and caught in an insurance industry Catch-22. At the same time, Reznor was often openly hostile to his followers and fans, at one point calling out a woman he claimed was a “stalker” who was now following his twitter account, posting her real name, address, and mentioning he had a restraining order against her on the account. Reznor was stuck begging for support for a third party from the very people on which he heaped abuse in public.
Finally, in June, Reznor semi-closed his twitter account, instituting a policy of no longer reading replies. The account limped along for another month, but it was obvious that his heart wasn’t in it anymore: “Twitter is pretty boring using it this way.” Finally, a month after switching over to broadcast-only, he tweeted “I believe I’ve done all I care to do here at this point. Flesh and reality and silence are calling,” and the account sat dormant for three months. His final verdict on his website about social media was that, in the end, “idiots rule.”
I haven’t encountered the same level of hostility that Reznor did — but then again, I’m not a chart-topping recording artist. Most of the nonsense I’ve run into is in the form of spam accounts — which simply spew replies to anyone they can find — or the ubiquitous “network marketing experts” who want to try and connect with as many people as possible, even if they have nothing in common. But generally, Twitter is populated by people I want to listen to, and there are enough people who find me interesting that I don’t feel like I’m shouting into the void.
Jacques doesn’t have to worry about that sensation. One of the positive effects of both his twitter account and the constellation of other accounts by other artists working in the same medium — that is, webcomics — is that it’s fostered a much greater sense of comradery, both among the creators and among the fans. “I think it has both strengthened our little ‘community’ and given a much stronger image of our community.” This is something that hadn’t been visible to most fans before twitter, or was only on display when the artists and writers gathered together, at conventions and the like, and only then for the small percentage of fans able to attend.
The playful banter of the artists giving each other grief about updating — Jacques and another cartoonist, Danielle Corsetto, were racing earlier this month to see who could finish and update their comics before midnight, and ‘shouting’ at each other on twitter about it — is one of the beautiful things about twitter that keeps me interested in the message service. It’s both a handy way to be amused at odd hours of the day, a great way to communicate with people whom I’ve never met who live on the other side of the world, and a useful pressure-valve for creative energy — a place to stick half-baked notions in short-form to return to later.
Even the annoyed and discouraged Reznor has been unable to resist twitter’s siren song; in December, he revived the account with “Is this thing on?” and has since dribbled out ten more posts about both official Nine Inch Nails news and his own churlish opinions, including bashing the Grammys. For better or for worse, Reznor has decided that it’s maybe not the worst torment in the world to let people see how you really feel.
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