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A couple of years ago Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, left his girlfriend right on the pages of the encyclopedia online, changing his biography to be engaged in singles. She retaliated by immediately putting some clothes on eBay Wales. The two were pioneers of a new way to say goodbye: online.
It 's just been released in the United States an essay titled The breakup 2.0 , where Ilana Gershon , a professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, explores the different ways in which people use new media to end relations. It also assesses the consequences.
Among the 72 people interviewed for his research, most of them college students who make extensive use of mobile phones, internet and social networks, Gershon has received many testimonies of "downloaded" post-modern. Some, like the former girlfriend of Wales, she discovered she was left by the Facebook profile updates not only of the partners, but also of its own, automatically changed accordingly. The problem is that it can happen that your Facebook friends of the couple are breaking the first to know of the individual concerned.
"Almost all," says Gershon, "agree that the best way is to let a meeting face to face." The only ones who think it is also possible to use less direct ways "to be always imagine them to leave, but would never want to be on the side of give it up."
With all the new media that we have to communicate, including SMS, email, IM, Twitter, blogs and status updates on social networking sites, Facebook in mind, it is possible to establish a ranking of the most tolerable ways to say goodbye? "What really surprised me," says the author, "is that let the phone is now much more acceptable than it was 15 or 20 years ago. With all the alternatives available, have a conversation, as mediated by the telephone, is considered broadly acceptable. "
It is hard to discover if they were left by a social network updates, born among others to get together and not say goodbye, even harder to resist the temptation to "spy" on the former to try to understand the reasons for which has been left. "What I found interesting separation of many stories I've gathered is that it is a detective story," says Gershon. The rejected lovers throw themselves often in a thorough investigation and monitoring of the various social network profiles former partners discover new details of his life from which deduce the reasons for the breakup.
Harm or cyberstalking? One way to torture yourself unnecessarily sophisticated technology or an unacceptable invasion of privacy of others? In times when the word privacy has lost much of its meaning, there are other dilemmas to be resolved. For example, what to do in a couple of photos taken and posted on bulletin boards around the net? You can not burn in a cathartic bonfire, as they once did, and it is much harder to get rid of it because the images assigned to the network can suddenly reappear out from every corner of every board of every Facebook friend.
"My research has produced a handbook of rules for letting. There's only one that I can give at the end of all interviews, "says Ilana Gershon. "Do not share passwords. And if you have shared passwords change them as soon as you think that a break with your partner is imminent. " A strange lesson to learn in the age of the total share.
