[Infowarrior] - Breaking Up in a Digital Fishbowl

[Richard Forno]

January 7, 2010
Breaking Up in a Digital Fishbowl
By LAURA M. HOLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/fashion/07breakup.html?pagewanted=print

THERE is a scene in the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You” in which  
Mary, played by Drew Barrymore, laments the numerous technological  
ways she is being rebuffed by a potential beau. E-mail. Text messages.  
MySpace. “It’s exhausting,” she complains.

Well, Mary, it’s even worse after the relationship.

Ask Kashmir Hill, who was stung one day when she logged into a former  
boyfriend’s e-mail account — they had agreed to share passwords — and  
read a note he sent his mother explaining why he was no longer in  
love. The couple shared an online bank account and, for months after  
the breakup, Ms. Hill pored over the balance as it dwindled to $10.  
She cried when she finally closed the account.

“It’s enough to get rejected in real life,” said Ms. Hill, 28, who  
blogs about legal issues and lives in New York. “But does it have to  
happen so often in my online world too? It makes me want to keep my  
digital life separate in future relationships, whomever they are with.”

A new dating order has emerged in the era of social media. Couples who  
used to see each other’s friends only at parties now enjoy 24-hour  
access to their beloved’s confidants thanks to Facebook. Sharing  
passwords to e-mail accounts, bank accounts and photo-sharing sites is  
the new currency of intimacy. And courtship — however brief or intense  
— is wantonly scrutinized by the whole world on Twitter, Tumblr and  
Facebook.

As a result, the idea of what it means to break up is also being  
redefined. Where once a spurned lover could use scissors (literally)  
to cut an ex out of the picture, digital images of the smiling couple  
in happier days abound on the Web and are difficult to delete. Status  
updates and tweets have a way of wending their way back to scorned  
exes, thanks to the interconnectedness of social media. And breakups,  
awkward and drawn-out in person, are even more so online as details  
are parsed by the curious, their faces pressed against the digital  
glass.

“When you make a decision to be with a person in cyberspace you are  
making a commitment to their network of friends and acquaintances,”  
said Liz Perle, a co-founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit  
watchdog group that studies families and media. “People have so many  
online strings that bind them that cutting one does not sever the  
relationship. There are always more.”

One byproduct of the digital revolution is that trust is being  
assigned new meaning. According to the Internet and American Life  
Project at the Pew Research Center, one in five teenagers polled  
shares online passwords as a way to build trust and foster romance.  
Grown-ups, explained Lee Rainie, the project’s director, are  
exhibiting similar behavior. And it is not just women affected by  
changing rules of digital etiquette, but men too. (Several men  
contacted for this article declined to discuss their breakups publicly.)

Some family law practitioners say they are grappling with the  
complexities of online entanglements in real-world divorce.

Randall Kessler, a lawyer in Atlanta, said he advises divorcing  
clients to change their passwords, stop posting on social networking  
sites, acquire a new e-mail address, and secure or make copies of  
whatever is posted about them online. Users, of course, control what  
they post on private accounts. Where it gets tricky, though, is when  
photos, videos and comments have been forwarded, retweeted or reposted  
to friends’ accounts or on public Web sites.

“There are whole new rules of digital etiquette we are going to have  
to figure out,” Mr. Rainie said. “Right now, we don’t have the tools.  
That makes it very confusing for most people.”

Sam Altman, the chief executive of Loopt, a mobile tracking service  
that allows users to monitor friends’ locations using the G.P.S.  
software on their cellphones, said he was seeing social mores shift  
firsthand. About 20 percent of Loopt’s users are couples who buy the  
service to keep track of each other’s whereabouts. But in the past six  
months, there has been an increase in the number of customers who use  
fake locations as a decoy so a person doesn’t know where they are, Mr.  
Altman said, a service that Loopt offers.

He explained that some of those customers have broken up and now want  
privacy. At the same time, they don’t want to offend an ex by overtly  
letting them know they have been blocked. “People who break up always  
want to change their location immediately,” Mr. Altman said. At the  
same time, “unless it was nasty, they don’t want rush to tell everyone  
they’ve split up either,” he said. “Better to be cautious than hasty.”

The reason is simple: some hope the romance will be rekindled.  
Similarly, closing a joint bank account or switching to “single”  
status on your Facebook page suggests a permanent break.

Debora Spencer, a Seattle photographer, split up this summer with a  
longtime boyfriend with whom she lived for four years. Like many exes,  
she grappled with whether to remain Facebook friends. “At first I  
could not defriend him,” she said. “It seemed so high school. I mean,  
I’m 50 years old.”

Early in the relationship, Ms. Spencer’s partner had friended many of  
her Facebook pals so their networks overlapped. After the breakup, she  
still received his status updates and read comments he posted on her  
friends’ walls. That made her realize that he knew everything she was  
doing, too.

So she defriended him, hoping it would stop the flow of news.

It didn’t. One friend continued to forward her ex’s status reports and  
comments. Another called Ms. Spencer after seeing a photograph of her  
former boyfriend with another woman. “It’s not like I wanted to know  
this,” Ms. Spencer said. Finally, she decided to block her ex  
completely and asked friends to stop sending updates.

“You learn things so quickly, within minutes,” she said. “Even if we  
had lived together in a small town, I don’t think I would have learned  
half of what I did as quickly as I did on Facebook.”

Still, with any failed romance, there is always the temptation to  
follow up with an ex. And social networks, by design, sate hungry  
curiosity. Sally Che, a 25-year-old medical student at George  
Washington University, ended a possible romance three years ago after  
the man started dating a former girlfriend. (Ms. Che learned about the  
affair in a status update on his Facebook page.)

She hasn’t spoken to him in years and has no desire to restart their  
relationship. Despite that, the two remain Facebook friends. And,  
every now and then, and against her better judgment, she said, she  
trolls his page seeking fresh news. “The temptation is to look and  
find out what someone is up to even if it hurts,” Ms. Che said.  
“People who you would never talk to again are only a click away. You  
see where they are traveling. You check out the picture of the new  
girlfriend to see if he downgraded. There is this fine line between  
being that crazy girl who de-tags photos and gets rid of every little  
thing and the one who willingly continues the charade of friendship.”

“It’s hard to figure out the middle ground,” Ms. Che said. “The thing  
is you never really get out of the relationship.” Ms. Perle of Common  
Sense Media told the story of a friend, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur,  
who broke up recently. Her dilemma was different from Ms. Spencer’s:  
She wanted to sever ties with the man but not with his children. So  
she defriended him while remaining friends on Facebook with his  
children.

Still, photographs of the couple during happier days abound online.  
“These pictures travel,” said Ms. Perle, as she recently clicked  
through a Web slideshow of the couple. “You have no control once they  
are integrated into other people’s pages.”

In other words, she added, “you cannot de-boyfriend yourself.”