Twitter, for anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know, is a free social network on which users update their “followers” about where they are, what they’re doing or what they think — up to the minute.  Essentially, it is a way to shotgun micro-blogs about your life (called tweets) to an audience of email pals you gather.  Ashton Kutcher has over 1,000,000 people following his posts.  I think my babysitter has about 100.

Twitter sounds like fun.  It seems pretty harmless.  And it’s really catching on, with over 50 million monthly visitors and a growth rate far surpassing 1000 percent per year.

There’s something troubling about Twitter psychologically, though.  You could say the same for Facebook or MySpace and YouTube, but Twitter is potentially bigger trouble than any of the others.  That’s because it can turn people into instant, mini-reality show versions of themselves — into entertainers, removed a little bit or a whole lot from their real feelings, genuine thoughts and true connections to others.

See, sending out tweets to “followers” isn’t a lot different than reporting your life as though you’re your own member of the paparazzi.  It presumes that people care what you’re up to, which may not be entirely true and can be the growing place for narcissism.  Narcissism, by the way, is unreasonable self-love, and it’s reaching epidemic proportions in this country.  Young people think the world of themselves, even as their performance academically and in many other arenas declines.

Reporting on your own life story can also make you tend toward the dramatic in your daily existence.  After all, who wants to send out boring tweets?  You need to be reporting on adventure, romance, and, above all, conflict.  As any decent screenwriter will tell you, people tune out if there’s no conflict.  But when did we decide that being a human being, even an interesting human being, meant being “watchable” enough for people to “tune into” your broadcasts? 

We didn’t decide any such thing.  The yielding of humanity to technology, the bleeding of our true selves into fake profiles we manufacture for semi-public digestion has been a largely unconscious slippery slope.  Technology has pushed us there.  Media has pushed us there.  Celebrities hell-bent on making us worship them have pushed us there.  But more than anything, our own discomfort with being real people, our own anxieties about whether we really matter, doubts about whether we are lovable and fear of our own mortality has pushed us there.

Recently, surgeons have gotten into the Twitter game.  They are broadcasting complex surgeries with constant tweets written up by OR staff so families or the general public can get up-to-the-minute reports about kidney transplants and the like.  Doctors even do little PR tours about breaking new ground with their twittering.  Well, guess what?  I don’t want my doctor playing media darling while he or she is working inside my body.  And I don’t need nurses hoping to be mentioned on a tweet.  I want them focused on reality, on life and death, on me.

Here’s the really scary part.  Twitter isn’t the end of the self-broadcasting phenomenon.  There will be son of Twitter.  And we will be that much further along the slippery slope to being actors in our own life stories, devoid of anything real, looking only for drama.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

On Monday, June 16, 49-year-old Lori Drew pled not guilty in Federal Court to one count of conspiracy and three counts of using a computer to inflict emotional distress (violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).

Drew, of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., is accused of creating a phony MySpace account, which convinced her teenaged neighbor Megan Meier that a boy named Josh Evans (who never existed) had fallen in love with her, then suddenly came to despise her. In one message, “Evans” wrote Meier that the world would be better off without her. Brokenhearted, Meier hanged herself.

I met Megan’s mother Tina, a courageous woman who has become a national crusader against cyberbullying.

There is more at stake here, however, even than that noble goal. The Lori Drew case is another wake-up call that proves how our genuine and exquisite human emotions and vulnerabilities can be tapped and twisted by technologies like the Internet, which can “infect” us with toxic fictions that cause real-life injuries, even death.

This is a time when millions of Americans are using social networks to “connect” with one another without really knowing whether the “individuals” on the other side of those connections are speaking the truth and divulging real insights about themselves, or manufacturing “profiles” in order to manipulate and, ultimately, inflict harm on them. We are attaching ourselves to sometimes-contrived life stories that may have no roots in reality, thereby putting vulnerable individuals at the mercy of cyber-imposters who can emotionally assault from an infinite distance.

Too many of us are primed for these toxic and fictional relationships because the Web encourages them. The business plan of the reprehensible Second Life, for example, is to offer people the opportunity to live alternate existences unfettered by the real facts of their lives. 

Webkinz offers children the chance to care for cyberpets that are not real, yet attempt to elicit real emotional connections—like concern for whether the animals are having fun and enjoying their little, animated rooms. This bending of reality is not without consequences. One consequence is that we lose our ability to separate reality from fantasy and become permeable to interpersonal, Internet fraud.

This isn’t the fault of MySpace. It is a byproduct of the times and technology and of less socially responsible sites like the ones I have mentioned above.

One way (I hope) people can fight back, is by participating in communities that put truth-telling front and center as a goal. I’ve created one called Living the Truth. Although that network isn’t immune to manipulators, it is filled with thousands of members dedicated to honesty, and therefore, I hope it will be more likely to filter out imposters.

Here’s the best antidote, especially for our young people: We must tell them that nothing they experience in cyberspace is as trustworthy as what they see with their own eyes, can touch with their own hands and can feel with their own hearts. We must encourage them to speak openly with us—their parents—and with their siblings and their close friends about their true feelings. We should remind them, always, of the wisdom of the body, the value of physical fitness and of inhaling the real air available only in Nature, not on the Web. We should reaffirm our connection to other real, living beings, like our pets and the endangered species we seek to protect from harm.

The Internet can disconnect us from ourselves and make us vulnerable to others who are using wireless technology to float free of the responsibility for their very real anger and violence. We need to close some of the space that now separates us from one another and from reality. We can’t forget to join hands as we join social networks.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.