ABSTRACT
The following scene was observed by one of us in a city of southern Italy. A traffic accident had just occurred at a street intersection. A car had hit two youngsters riding a motorbike. The two severely wounded victims were lying down on the street. In an instant, the crowd of gaping people around them was so thick that the ambulance had to stop at some distance and the medics could hardly get through. Particularly striking was the following fact: Most of the people in the crowd were using their cellular phone, reporting on-line to some close person the emotional scene they were witnessing. In this anecdotal observation, people who experienced emotion evidenced a marked need to share it and to talk about it. Before the advent of cellular phones, in such a situation, this need would have been expressed on-site: The individuals gaping at an accident scene would have been observed to talk to each other; the observer would have missed the fact that later on, when back home, all these people would have talked again about the scene and told their intimates what they had witnessed. Now that modern technology makes it possible, cellular phones clearly revealed that people who have the urge to share an emotion do so with their intimates rather than with unknown individuals around them.
