It's been a while since I've posted anything resembling any import. Judging from the contents of this entry,it may even be longer still. Whateves.
For those of you following me on FriendFeed this morning, I've been closely following the Iranian Vote protests, the lack of reporting about them (until this morning) on US mainstream media outlets, and the Iranian efforts to crack down on not just the protests, but reporting about them (they blocked all internet communication outlets but Twitter - interesting). Then @amandachapel (I can only admit that I'm still subbed to that fraud for comedic value, more than anything) showed up on my Twitter feed with the following:
SMEDIA QUOTE OF THE WEEK by @Trent_Reznor "I'll be tuning out of the SM sites because at the end of the day it's doing more harm than good."
Puleeze!
This quote was pulled from the above linked article from Billboard magazine. Poor Trent let the haters get to him, and rather than block them from viewing his Twitter feed, he issued a press release saying he'll no longer be available online.
OMG! The apocolypse has arrived!
Granted, one can argue that "Celebrities" (and I use the term loosely, given that anyone with any kind of following can now be regarded as one, I suppose) have a harder time with social media than "normal" people, who don't have a problem with telling their friends (whether they know them in real life or not) what they had for breakfast that day. Their words are always followed, and pounced on if they "tweet" something some may consider "out of line".
Then there's the Kathy Sierra situaton. You all know about what happened to her, don't you?
I'll forgo my comments of what I think about people who issue press releases about being online. But what I will say this. If all you are are doing on there is answering people who do nothing but attack, you are doing it wrong.
Everyone, in life, deals with trolls. They take forms in various guises. The bUlly at school. The viperous colleague, the secretly jealous best friend who tears you down in a dress colored as "being honest". And so on. It's more insidious online for the obvious reasons that have been explained ad nauseum by other better about writing of this sort of thing.
That doesn't mean that you must put up with it.
TWitter, Facebook, et. al. has a bunch of tools for you to filter out/block people who spew hate your way. If you have a blog (or several), you have the option of blocking certain comments from accessing your entries, whether they be spam, from certain IP addresses, etc. WOrdpress.com partners with Akismet, a firm which specializes in blocking blog spam/hate.
The social networks that I belong to (the aforementioned FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace, etc) have strong built-in filtering mechanisms to make your social networking experience the way YOU want it to be. What people tend to forget (especially "celebrities") is that your Social networking account IS your house. You CAN control who goes in, who gets kicked out. You can either allow a free-for-all democracy, or you can take control over how your fans (and others) behave themselves at your house. To me, democracies do not work. There's always some asshat who will try your patience, as well as the patience of others. Personally, I have no time to deal with the asshattery of some blowhard with an agenda, so I toss him out.
A lot of them just have their PR people do it for them. Dishonest, I know, but then there's no headache. One of my all time fave bands has one guy handling their ENTIRE web presence for them, from their website to their Myspace to their Twitter accounts. Again, dishonest, but less of a headache for the band. If you are too big, then it's too difficult to speak to everyone. Artists such as myself do not suffer this issue, thank God/dess.
So, in passing, artists who are upset about hatred being spewed at them on their Twitter accounts need to control their accounts more effectively. If they can't be bothered to learn the tools to make their experience online more enjoyable, they are...just...doing...it...wrong. TA!