Elizabeth Bernstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal, astutely observes that the promise of Facebook and Twitter—to bring people closer by putting their lives online, with up-to-the-minute updates—can have the opposite effect.  Many people, she writes, use “friending” and “tweeting” as a surface and synthetic way to talk about the fun outings they’re planning or the fact that they just closed another sale at work. 
 
“I’m tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or event write a decent email,” Bernstein writes, “yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes . . . or tweeting about their latest whereabouts.”
 
That’s just the beginning from a psychological point of view.  Facebook and other social-media “destinations” not only provide cover from more genuine and intimate human interactions, they can encourage people to present themselves as actors in their own semi-made-up life stories.  They can remove people from reality, heightening their narcissism (which we all have, to a lesser or greater extent), making them not only self-obsessed, but intent on projecting a multi-media fictional representation of how happy and successful and social they are. 
 
As Marshall McLuhan wrote, the medium is the message.  There is no avoiding the fact that social-media sites call upon members to use a keyboard, hard drive and computer screen, together with photos, video and words to create evolving autobiographies for “broadcast” on the Web.  This very process creates a kind of dual existence, consisting of one’s real life and one’s life on-line.  The online version can pull people away from their deepest thoughts and emotions and relationships—from what constitutes their real selves—into the abbreviated or evasive or attention-grabbing kind that can be packaged for mass consumption. 
 
This is more than an academic concern.  It’s a human and clinical concern.  The distance between a person’s contrived self and real self is the growing place for anxiety and depression.  Today’s social-media sites can expand that distance until, distracted too long from the noble and, ultimately, healing battle to understand oneself and others for real, swells of genuine emotion feel like tidal waves. 
 
Indeed, I have already worked with several clients for whom using social media sites has, in and of itself, coaxed them away from the truth about their lives, toward a kind of technologically intoxicated vacation from it.  Together, we struggle to take the journey back.
 
Anatole Broyard, the late and great NY Times book critic, once wrote, “Inside every patient, there’s a poet trying to get out.”  We could now add that behind every Facebook profile, there’s a real life story just waiting to be told.  
 

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 murders of Arturo Gatti, possibly by his 23-year-old ex-stripper wife, and of Steve McNair by his 20-year-old lover, may reflect yet another sign that more Americans than we know —especially younger Americans — are losing their sense of self and, with it, their psychological and moral bearings.  

Certainly, crimes of passion are nothing new.  As has always been true, the killers of Gatti and McNair had to have had extreme life stories with major psychological fault lines reaching back, quite possibly, to childhood.  But in both cases, the victims were famous men who may well have offered the women in their lives temporary and fragile shelter from deep, unresolved questions about whether they could exist independently or would crumble into nothingness without their connections to fame and fortune. It is often those who feel dead themselves who take the lives of others.

Some may think it’s too big a leap to draw any connection between a lack of respect for life and the artificial, Internet-based, technology-fueled existences that too many of today’s teens and twenty-somethings have lived, but I’m not so sure.  I think that the kind of existential panic — the panic of having nothing real at one’s core — that can lead a young woman to murder her famous lover, rather than lose him, is a distant cousin of posting videos on YouTube of staged beatings and the deconstruction of real lives and relationships into profiles, IMs and tweets.

In a world that worships reality TV parents who turn their children into entertainment automatons and a psychologically disturbed pop star whose celebrity was initially forged through enslavement to his sadistic father, respect for one’s own life and that of others can start to erode.  Gaining fame and saving face on Facebook is what matters, and the loss of image can feel like the loss of everything.  I hope I’m wrong.  I hope that cases of extreme violence are now just the same as they always were — outlying cases that are no predictor of anything about the rest of us.  

But as a psychiatrist who has made it part of my life’s work to resist dismissing my instincts, I now sense something ominous about our culture reflected in the worst deeds of the most violent among us.  I fear we are at risk for losing respect for one another and for human life.  I fear our fragile God-given capacity for empathy is under siege. I fear that in obsessing over “Blanket” Jackson (and I feel a little disturbed by even writing his preposterous name), who was dangled over a railing by a father who may not have fathered him at all, we open the door to outlandish acts of dramatic violence that would make for decent psychological thrillers, but are now the stuff of what we call “real” life.

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.