The Breakup 2.1: The ten-year update

Abstract

Since 2007–2008, American undergraduates’ media ecology has changed dramatically without an accompanying transformation in how they use media to end relationships. The similarities in people’s breakup practices between 2008 and 2018 reveal that, regardless of what social media is used, American undergraduates turn to media in moments of breakup as ways to manage three complicated aspects of ending a relationship: untangling all the ways in which people signal intertwined lives, deciphering the quotidian unknowable of another person’s mind, and trying to control who knows what when. This paper explores how rapid shifts in media ecologies may change the ways in which conventionalization around social practices emerges, leading to more norms oriented around what all media accomplish, rather than generating norms around the affordances of a specific medium.

Keywords:

• Breakups
• conventionalization
• media ecologies
• social change
• social media
• social norms

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Richard Bauman for introducing me to the term of art “Premature Geezer talk,” and wide-ranging conversations about the topics in this paper. Katrien Pype, Karen Schiff and Amanda Weidman read the paper carefully and offered promising lines of argument to develop. I am also grateful to Hugh Gusterson, Jennifer Roth Gordon, and the anthropology department at the University of Arizona for helpful questions.

Notes

1 Mark Deuze, personal communication.

2 Not so surprisingly, taking down one’s Tinder profile is a sign of commitment, now that so many undergraduates use Tinder and other dating apps. Meanwhile figuring out how to suggest to someone that they should take down their Tinder profile, if they haven’t yet, is a source of anxiety that requires quite a bit of consultation with one’s friends.

3 https://www.techjunkie.com/longest-snapchat-streak/

4 This is an American viewpoint, and not necessarily how people in other cultures understand what qualifies as a good breakup.