Place people in meta boxes as they move from place to place and they often get more angry with each other than if the boxes weren’t there. The phenomenon is known as road rage and may have something to do with the removal of conflict inhibitions when contact with other hairless apes is more impersonal.
Sometimes, however the proximity of personal contact can be a bad thing, most murders happen in families and most wars are civil wars.
The Internet increases communication and personal contact, but in a way that is more impersonal than face to face, and the phenomenon of online flame wars seems to be similar to road rage.
I can’t seem to find any studies on this, but am curious as to what extent something like the Internet which is primarily a communications medium, and therefore hardly a failure to communicate, can have a negative effect on people getting on with each other, and what the dynamics of that are.
What would a map of Internet conflict look like?
The other thing they have in common is a mediation of physicality. You can tense your muscles all you want, but it will do no good.