You’ve probably heard that dentists commit suicide at a disproportionately high level. Whether that’s actually true is subject to debate, but for my purposes here it doesn’t matter.
When I was a kid, my sister had this theory (I think it was mostly a joke) about why dentists allegedly commit suicide at a high rate. She said they’re getting in close with people, and when you’re that close to someone you have an urge either to kiss them or to kill them. Suicide is a consequence of that daily tension!
Again, I think she was joking, but there’s an underlying lesson there — i.e., there are situations that mix and confuse our sense of distance with our sense of intimacy.
I thought of that when I heard a comment about the problem with Twitter.
In normal life, you don’t have many conversations with random strangers, and when you do, it’s about the weather, or directions, or something like that. You don’t talk about controversial issues.
On Twitter, you do precisely that. So it could be that part of the problem with Twitter is the disconnect between intimacy and distance.
Consider how easy it is to get angry with other drivers when you feel as if they’ve slighted you, or didn’t follow the rules. You would never get that angry in a crowd of people, and certainly not among people you know. The problem is the sense of anonymity you have when you’re driving. You don’t know them and they don’t know you.
It may be that Twitter is the perfect storm of all these things. You feel anonymous, but too close. You’re talking to strangers about intimate things. When someone is mean, if feels like a friend has betrayed you. It’s a toxic mix that our brains aren’t trained to handle.