Social media fucks with our heads because here, those two places are the same.
And that is not about control. It's about user interface choices.
Specifically, when I step on my soap box and announce the contents of this thread loudly to passers-by, your experience of it is me breaking down your door, standing next to your sofa, and shouting this in your face.
In other words, you're in a safe, accepting environment, in which you open yourself to affirming interactions, while I'm actively...
... prepared for non-accepting interactions.
This is because the norm for user interfaces for social media makes no distinction between the "places" in which I produce content and you consume it.
Contrast this to e.g. blogs. You can consume them on your sofa just fine, via an RSS feed, just like you might subscribe to a physical newspaper. But when you want to react to this, you have to go to the speaker's soap box and comment there. Or you have to step on our own soap box, and phrase your...
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