Every once in a while I read something about community dynamics which really resonates with me, and I felt like I'd share this one.
There's a lady by the name of Marian Call who sings some music and keeps a very active, friendly online presence with her fanbase. This friendliness is a bit unusual for a traditional artist. For instance, she recently did a 50-state tour, mostly driving herself from location to location and staying in the offered homes of fans in the cities she was playing. Despite following over 6,800 people on Twitter, she still regularly responds to fan comments on there. In an interview in November, Jonathan Coulton, another world-small-but-Internet-big musician specifically mentioned this practice, noting that he has had to distance himself from direct communication with fans as the size of his audience has grown beyond his abilities to directly interface with it.
Recently, Miss Call announced that she was going to take some steps to separate her personal Facebook presence from her music presence, and someone asked her to be more detailed about this in a Formspring question.
Her reply, in part:
In those instances I might opt to feign rather than confront — not in order to be fake, but because I'm old-fashioned, and a fan of manners, and I believe that in a community you try your damnedest to love everyone, including folks who get on your nerves sometimes. You keep people in the community, you don't drive them out, even if they're occasionally a little awkward.
I can't think of anything to add to that.