The enigmatic musician Prince has long been an enemy of the internet and has been very active in exercising his rights to his music in order to have it removed from YouTube and other sites time and again. The Purple One even went as far as saying that the "internet is completely over" and that "all these computers and gadgets are no good ... they just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you" in a 2010 interview.

But now it seems that the artist formerly known as Prince and then once again known as Prince has put aside his hatred of all things internet and is making use of Twitter to promote his upcoming project. In a series of tweets posted to the @3rdeyegirl account, Prince introduced himself to Twitter and asked such provocative questions as "DID EYE ADD 2 MUCH PEPPER?" to his salad. Though the account has been around for some time, Prince only recently started tweeting from it himself, and Twitter has indeed verified it as him. Since Prince's first tweets were posted yesterday, it seems that his management team has resumed control of the account and begun interacting with his fans on Twitter.

Prince's absence from Twitter and other forms of social media along with his hatred of modern technology has been a long running joke across the internet. It has spawned hilarious parody accounts such as @PrinceTweets2U, which currently has about 50,000 more followers than Prince's legitimate account. Now that he has acknowledged and embraced (to a limited extent, at least) the promotional value associated with social media, it will be interesting to see if he changes his position on the internet as a whole. In the meantime, we can bask in the first selfie he's shared with the world: an image of wispy smoke that evokes the beginning of his 1984 "When Doves Cry" video.