David Carradine’s naked body was found hanging in a Bangkok, Thailand hotel room last Thursday morning, setting in motion a debate about whether the star of the feature film “Kill Bill” and the long-running television series “Kung Fu” (1972-1975) committed suicide, accidently died while attempting to stimulate himself through autoerotic asphyxia or was murdered.

While that debate rages on, a Thai newspaper called Thai Rath has published forensic photos of Carradine’s naked corpse.  His ex-wife Marina Anderson has also seen fit to tell the New York Post of Carradine’s “deviant sexual behavior.”

Here we are at the flipside of losing our inner selves to YouTube and Facebook and Twitter.  Too many of us suddenly all think we’re celebrities, but we also think that real celebrities are inhuman, celluloid creatures without the right to the privacy or decency befitting other human beings.  Some in society actually seem to think that the fact that actors make a living by … well … acting means that they have sold their souls to us and that we can devour them like movie popcorn.  That’s why the paparazzi thinks they have license to stalk stars as though they are alien creatures or zoo animals on the loose.  And it’s why we feel free to peek through windows into David Carradine’s most private acts and final moments. 

David Carradine was a person, before he was ever an actor.  What he signed up for was to share his gift and his craft with those who might enjoy it.  I’m one of those people.  Kung Fu was part of my childhood.  Something about Carradine’s quiet intensity, combined with the idea that he could not leave his training at the monastery until he could focus enough to snatch a pebble from his teacher’s open hand, got my attention and stayed with me all this time. 

But the fact that I was a young fan of Carradine doesn’t make me think I have the inherent right to look at naked photos of his dead body or get the inside scoop from his disgruntled ex-wife about what he liked to do in bed.  It would make me feel like a trespasser in his private life.  It would make me worry about doing harm to those who loved Carradine, in real life. 

That’s the trouble, though.  We don’t think of actors as real, anymore.  We don’t think of politicians as genuine, anymore.  We don’t think of sports stars as dedicated athletes, anymore.  We don’t think of the economy as a miraculous engine that runs only on the truth, anymore.  Because, in the end, too many of us don’t think enough of our real selves, anymore.

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.

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.