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.

When Drew Peterson was brought into court on charges that he murdered his third wife Kathleen Savio, he was in a good mood.  He yelled jokes to reporters about how “spiffy” his red prison jumpsuit was and called his shackles “bling.” 

Peterson is, of course, also a suspect in the 2007 disappearance of Stacy Peterson, his fourth wife.  He insists he is an innocent man.

Think of how you’d respond to being dragged into court on murder charges, especially if you were wrongly accused.  You might be terrified or confused or enraged at the injustice of your plight, but you wouldn’t be all smiles, spewing one-liners.

So how can Drew Peterson do it?

To have any hope of understanding Drew Peterson, one first has to understand human empathy.   Empathy is the ability to resonate with the feelings of others to such an extent that one actually experiences some of their joy or grief or anxiety.  It is a remarkable and inexplicable quality that we too often take for granted.  The fact that a friend can be brought to tears by a loss of yours, that you can intuit and share the worries or hopes or pride of your partner in life, or that the hunger of children thousands of miles away could spur you to action on their behalf is a tribute to this miraculous force.

Empathy does even more, though.  It helps us contain our anger and our destructive impulses, because we can imagine how it might feel to be the object of that rage.  It also helps us gauge what is appropriate language and behavior in various situations, again because we can imagine how others are likely to respond to us.  We can put ourselves in the shoes of our friends or neighbors or loved ones. 

I believe empathy is an essential ingredient in experiencing guilt, as well.  If you can’t imagine the injuries you may have done another person—can’t feel their pain in any measure—then you aren’t likely to worry over any harm you’ve done them.  The absence of empathy is the growing place for antisocial and narcissistic traits that set a person adrift from the interpersonal ties and sense of personal responsibility that bind the rest of us.

Drew Peterson may be largely devoid of empathy.  That’s why he just doesn’t get the fact that lobbing jokes to reporters while being dragged into court on charges he murdered a young woman is bizarre and macabre.  It’s why he believed he’d come across as credible on television during the media tour he orchestrated after the disappearance of Stacy Peterson.  It’s why he probably is confident a jury will acquit him (which, of course, it could).  Peterson may not be able to put himself in the place of others—at all.

One of the most toxic manifestations of having no empathy, of course, is that it leaves those without it free to inflict suffering on others.  There’s no wincing at causing them pain, even death.  In the forest of pure narcissistic and antisocial traits that grow in soil without roots of empathy, only self-preservation and one’s own needs matter.  No one and nothing else really does.

If Drew Peterson killed Kathleen Savio or is responsible for the disappearance of Stacy Peterson or both, he isn’t worried about any of that.  He’s busy with the opportunity to showcase what he believes is his extraordinary charm and intelligence and wit.  And he thinks you and I and every reporter and every judge and every juror will be mesmerized.

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.

The brazenness of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly attempting to sell a U.S. Senate seat and securities trader Bernie Madoff allegedly bilking investors (including charities) of about $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme may seem inexplicable.  But having evaluated dozens of white-collar criminals and very violent offenders over the past decade (and having testified about them in local, state and federal courts), I’ve realized many of them share recognizable psychological characteristics with convicted murderer Scott Peterson.  Peterson, you will recall, is the Modesto, California man who murdered his wife Laci and his unborn child Conner in the midst of an affair with massage therapist Amber Frey, then helped lead the search for his victims.

Like Scott Peterson, Blagojevich and Madoff (if guilty) have to possess a sense of narcissistic entitlement that allows them to feel justified in manipulating others to their ends.  Probably to hide internal feelings of unworthiness, weakness, or impotence, such men (or, in other cases, women—including, perhaps, Blagojevich’s wife) create an over-inflated sense of self.  Their minds build towering fortresses of ego immune to the reticence most of us would feel about putting ourselves first and everyone else second.  

The narcissistic traits of Peterson, Blagojevich and Madoff (none of whom I interviewed) mean that they not only feel entitled to live special lives that don’t include following rules — they may well believe they are so intelligent or clever that they will never be caught breaking those rules.  That partly explains the outlandish nature of each man’s behavior.

Peterson fashioned his own cement anchors to weigh down his wife’s body in the San Francisco Bay.  It didn’t occur to him that making anchors and taking his boat out on the bay might implicate him in the disappearance of Laci. 

Blagojevich challenged authorities to monitor him and even reportedly wheeled and dealed on a telephone he knew was tapped.

Madoff delivered outsized returns to his clients every year, apparently not worried about the fact that doing so seemed impossible to some.  In his own mind, he was that special.  He never lost — until it was all over.

Narcissism, however, doesn’t explain all of Scott Peterson’s murderous violence or Blagojevich’s and Madoff’s alleged schemes to sell a piece of the United States government or steal money.  There also has to be a failure to recognize both the importance of the rule of law and a failure of empathy.  All three men were seemingly unmoved by the rights or the suffering of others.  To steal a life may seem wholly unrelated to stealing someone’s life savings or someone’s vote, but they are closer cousins than you might believe. 

Unfortunately, the outsized nature of what is likely the Peterson-Blagojevich-Madoff brand of personality structure attracts, rather than repels people.  Peterson had no shortage of women.  Blagojevich had no shortage of voters.  And Madoff had no shortage of investors.  They seem so certain of everything, so much larger than anything that might contain them, that they seduce mere mortals, burdened as we are by self-doubt and respect for others — and a respect for our society and the rule of law.

Dr. Ablow is a Fox News contributor and the author of the New York Times bestseller “Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson.”