Last month somebody on Twittter told me to shut up. At this particular time I did not feel I deserved it, primarily because I hadn't posted anything in the previous 24 hours. I am not much of a talker on Twitter anyway, on my profile page the count totals 500 tweets, sometimes it gets buggy and lists 700, and most of them are links to magazine or newspaper articles. I did not even know this RestlessBlogger, as was the username of the follower I have managed to annoy and therefore I considered it a random event, probably a mistake or another bug, so I ignored it. A few minutes later several retweets started appearing on my timeline all containing the word shut up, all in capitals. Restless was shouting at people to shut up. I clicked on his username and his profile came up. His whole timeline was filled with mentions to other users and a single phrase: shut up, on a couple of occasions preceded by the words "you too". For the next hour this amused my Twitter community very much. We did not know who Restless was, he certainly was not someone we knew in the offline world. We couldn't even understand if this outburst was real or a prank, but the sole fact that this person violated so bluntly the netiquette we were used to seemed quite entertaining. Pretty soon there were a lot of people complaining why Restless had not told them to shut up.
It was not difficult to find out more about him. On his profile there was a link to his blog and this was essentially an online diary. Reading his almost daily posts, where Restless seemed to document his thoughts exactly as they came to his mind, uninhibited, you learned that this was a boy around 20, a student, who suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and that the blog was created at his therapist's behest as means of treatment. The next day I tried to access his Twitter profile again, but it was not possible. I assumed that someone had reported him. People tend to get offended when you tell them to shut up.
There is a notion that when people communicate online they in some way modify their identity. That our electronic avatars are an ideal version of ourselves, nicer, cleverer, more polite, more attractive, more interesting, photoshopped. The most cautious of us tend to believe that stories like the one in the 2010 documentary Catfish about an acquaintance on Facebook gone awry are not very unlikely.
My experience with social media tells me this is not true. This is an empirical conclusion and admittedly based on a small sample, my followers, but for the time being I am not aware of any relevant research. I know personally half of my followers and I can tell that they behave online in the exact same way they do in the "real" world. Those who talk too much, talk too much online, the shy ones are shy online, the ones who are self promoting do it online too, the flirts flirt online, the ones who like to complain manage this very successfully online, and those who want to hide their identity can do it online too. People are more or less bound to express themselves in the same ways they do in their everyday lives. And that, it seems to me, is because the social media have bridged the gap between cyberspace and the real world. It's like walking in a room full of people, say a party. At first you are hesitant, your first tweet in a way betrays that you are new in this. Your following tweets most likely are going to be something related to your interests, it's like getting introduced and saying what you do. Then you start small talk with people you know, and pretty soon you are conversing with complete strangers. If in real life, for whatever reason, you feel anxious or stressed when you have to hear the chatter of a bunch of total strangers concentrated in a room, then this is what you are going to feel like on Twitter. And you would want them to shut up.