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1 Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover
MEDIA IDEOLOGIES AND
IDIOMS OF PRACTICE
Toward the end of the interview, just as the thirty-something Olivier and I began to say our good-byes, he told me that in the end, it was the way his wife (soon to be ex-wife) kept e-mailing
his work account that was particularly distressing. They were dis-
solving a marriage, and this disentangling required discussion,
most of which was taking place bye-mail. He was forced to create
a personal folder for all the e-mails she sent to his work account,
the only personal folder he had in this particular e-mail account.
No matter how often he e-mailed her personal e-mail account, no
matter how often he sent messages from his own personal e-mail
account, she insisted on using the accounts they had both set aside
for their professional lives. And when she sent these e-mails, she al-
ways sent them when she was at work. He could tell from the time
attached to each e-mail. The boundaries were clear-he was no
longer allowed to contact her personal account or interact with
her during her personal time.
Of course this probably wasn't what bothered Olivier the most
about the whole process. He was getting a divorce because his wife
had sent him an e-mail out of the blue asking for a divorce and
offering no reasons while he was away on a business trip. It turned
out to be a nonnegotiable decision. After the two-line e-mail
Fifty Ways 10 Leave YOllr Lover 17
announcing that she wanted a divorce, she would communicate
with him only bye-mail and occasional angry phone calls. She
closed their joint bank accounts while he was gone, so he returned
to no money and no place to stay. For weeks he had no explanation
that made sense of why she wanted a divorce, although gradually
he learned of another man, someone she had met at work. All the
communication he had with her gave him no clear insights into
why she was doing what she was doing. Knowing another man
existed did not seem to explain enough for him.
She was violating all the shared order that they carefully, or even
perhaps accidentally, created together-vvhen they spoke in French
or English together, when they sent e-mails to their friends from
their joint e-mail account, or when they would e-mail someone
from their individual personal accounts. The more Olivier detailed
how divorce was affecting how he and his wife/ex-wife were using
media to communicate, the more apparent it became that the cou-
ple had developed together a system for indicating that some mes-
sages were formal, some informal, some professional, and some
intimate. They used e-mail accounts, phones, and different lan-
guages all to create intertwined ways of adding information to the
message-a message from their joint e-mail account would signal
something different than if that same message had been sent from
their individual e-mail accounts. In e-mailing his work account,
his wife/ex-wife was rejecting all the years of chosen habits that
they had created together just through how they e-mailed. So the
unseemly disorder that Olivier experienced with these e-mails to
his work account-these weekly, sometimes daily, reminders of
how her decisions at every level had transformed his life's plans
into unwelcome chaos-captured the misery of this dissolution.
Since the moment she e-mailed him to demand a divorce, Olivier
explained that he felt none of his wishes were respected; sending
18 The Breakup 2.0
messages only to his work e-mail was a small example that seemed
to reverberate and point to all the others, beginning with the
e-mail requesting a divorce.
Olivier had been using the possibilities made available by e-mail-
multiple accounts-to sort his communication. His wife/ex-wife
was refusing to accede to this system of classifying communica-
tion. In short, she was sending information through her choice of
medium (e-mail and work account) as much as by the content of
her messages. This double communication in the message is pos-
sible only because of Olivier's, or anyone's, media ideologies. As
mentioned in the introduction, people's media ideologies--their
beliefs about how a medium communicates and structures com-
munication-makes a personal e-mail account different from a
work e-mail account, or a text message different from a phone call.
The difference often lies not in the actual message, but in people's
understandings of the media. Media ideologies are responsible for
the ways in which second-order information works (see chapter 4).
Second-order information refers to the information that can guide
you into understanding how particular words and statements
should be interpreted. 1 One never sends a message without the
message being accompanied by second-order information; that is,
without indications about how the sender would like the message
received.
You Can't Text Message Breakup
Media contain second-order information because of people's
media ideologies, people's understandings of howe-mail, phone,
1. This is part, but only part, of what linguistic anthropologists have called metapragmatics (see Silverstein 2001).
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 19
instant messaging (IM), and other media add important informa-
tion to the message. Let me give you a concrete example of when
someone's media ideology got in the way of interpreting the seri-
ousness of a text message. This is a story that Halle, an undergrad-
uate, told me toward the end of an interview, when she suddenly
remembered another story about texting. Halle and Doug had
been a couple for a number of weeks. They met in a class where
they both also became friends with Rianna. Rianna always struck
Halle as a little bit off-she was one of those people who always
seemed to say something slightly unexpected and awkward, some-
thing that made the other people in the conversation stop and
scratch their heads about how to continue the conversation. As
Halle and Doug started getting together, they started joking about
Rianna's social gracelessness-most of this by text message. After a
while, Halle began teasing Doug by text that he was secretly infatu-
ated with Rianna. This text joking carried on for a few weeks. Then
Doug texted Halle, telling her he had to break up with her because
he really was in love with Rianna. This was by text, a medium that
Halle had always used for joking. Texting was never a medium that
Halle used to convey serious information such as "I am breaking
up with you." So she couldn't understand the message at first. On
the one hand, it was a complete surprise: There was no immedi-
ately prior conversation the message could be referring to. On the
other hand, the only conversation they had ever had by text about
Rianna was one that joked about desire. She responded as though
Doug was still joking. He texted her back that he wasn't, that he
was completely serious. Halle narrates:
So then he texts me out of the blue: "I am bad at life." \%ich is how he talks, so I wrote back: "I know, but why?"
"Because I wasn't kidding about Rianna this whole time."
20 The Breakup 2.0
And I was like "yeah, right, hahaha:' And he says: "no really, I wasn't kidding."
[Halle interrupts recounting the texts to point out] These are all text messages.
[He continues] "No really, I really like her."
I was like-wait, are we still kidding? That is what I said, "Are we still kidding?"
And he said, "No, I talked to one of my best girlfriends from
home, and she said that it's not fair to keep seeing you the whole time I am thinking about her."
And I am like-what is going on? These are text messages about something that we have been joking about, and I have no idea what is going on. I am completely out of the loop .... So that was it. I haven't talked to him since.
The second-order communication-what Halle understands it
means to communicate this kind of information by text-seems
to her to be at odds with what the words of the text message were
about. For Halle, the medium was at odds with the message. She
had to do some follow-up investigation by asking him if he was
kidding so that she could decide what interpretation she should
finally give to the messages they were exchanging. In the end,
Halle decided that he had behaved badly by communicating this
to her by text, so badly that she stopped communicating with him
entirely.
How Halle understands texting as a medium shapes the ways
in which she responds to Doug's message. The texting was sup-
posed to give second-order disclaimers to the message-carried
along with the message was this imaginary additional frame urg-
ing the receiver to understand that nothing said in this medium is
serious because texting is not a serious medium. Halle feels that
Doug violates this tacit assumption-he says serious things in a
medium that she considers appropriate only for the most casual
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 21
and joking of conversations. Let's not forget that Doug tells Halle
that he wants to break up with her for Rianna, a woman she doesn't
respect and finds off-putting. This too is part of the story. But it is
Halle's media ideology that in her own account affects how she de-
cides to treat Doug afterward. She decides not to keep communi-
cating with someone who texts this kind of information, and thus
in her mind behaves badly. When Doug tried to get back together
repeatedly (by texting, not through face-to-face communication),
she turned him down. I am not saying Halle was wrong or right.
Instead, I am pointing to how important media ideologies can be
in shaping how people actually interpret the messages they receive.
Content isn't everything; media ideologies matter.
Sometimes when people talk about ideologies, they talk about
beliefs that mystify, that keep someone from understanding how
things truly are. The term ideology does not have that connotation
for me. Media ideologies are not true or false. An e-mail conversa-
tion is not, in its essence, more formal than an instant-message
conversation-or less honest or spontaneous, or more calculated.
But some people believe that e-mail is more formal, more dishon-
est, and more calculated, and this affects the ways they send and
interpret e-mail messages. Understanding people's media ideolo-
gies can give insights into how utterances are received, and why
people choose to reply in particular ways. But studying media ide-
ologies will not give insights into what is really being communi-
cated as opposed to what people believe is being communicated.
It is not an analytical tool for discerning truth or reality; instead,
it is but one analytical tool for understanding the ways in which
all communication is socially constructed and socially interpreted.
Understanding media ideologies is central to understanding how
communication happens, especially now when there are so many
possible media from which to choose.
22 The Breakup 2.0
The "How" of Breaking Up
Why do people talk about the medium of a breakup? In my
interviews, I learned about people's media ideologies from their
emotionally charged stories about endings. I was finding out about
how they thought the media that were used affected the communi-
cation when the conversations were all about love or desire and its
loss. People were talking about appropriateness all the time, about
why one medium might be appropriate or inappropriate for end-
ing a relationship. Sometimes I talked to people about how certain
technologies had contributed to ending relationships; for example,
how sharing passwords had, in retrospect, become the first step in
destroying a relationship. I talked to college students about ending
friendships as well, about the differences between ending roman-
tic relationships and ending friendships. What I now know about
people's media ideologies is intimately linked to what they said
about different media as a means for communicating about end-
ing relationships.
Talking about how people choose to end a relationship may be
a common American way to talk about breakups. When I was dis-
cussing this project with another anthropologist, Ray McDermott,
in a tea shop in Palo Alto, he recalled when he and his students
had interviewed Americans about being in a family in the early
1980s. He said that when people talked about divorce, many fo-
cused on how things were said, what words were used. At the time,
there weren't so many media to choose from-people would talk
in person, call on a landline or write a letter. Ray said that people
tended to describe their sense of outrage, injustice, and griev-
ance in terms of how someone had ended the relationship, not
thatthe relationship was ending. The resentment that people were
willing to voice about ending relationships all revolved around the
Fifty 1Nays to Lcav!.' Your Lover 23
form of the ending. When they would narrate how the relation-
ship ended, they would focus on what was said. In my interviews,
this held true as well. Turning to the media used is just an exten-
sion of a U.S. tendency to discuss breakups by describing the way
breakups took place. vVhen people focus on the "how" of a breakup, particular as-
pects of a medium become important-whether it is too formal
or too informal, whether it allows for intonation, conversational
turn-taking, circulation of the breakup text, explanation, and so
on. In my interviews, some media were generally acknowledged
to be deficient in one way or another. When people explained to
me the problems with texting, as I mentioned in the introduction,
they often focused on how brief text messages had to be. Breakups
should ideally be adequately explained, and how much can one
actually say in 160 characters? In addition, some people insisted,
text messages were for deciding only the most casual of arrange-
ments such as when one should meet for dinner or who else might
want to go to the movies. For these people, text messaging is too
informal for something as serious or important as a breakup.
Formality and Informality: Assessing Media
The formality or informality of a medium depends on people's
media ideologies; there is nothing inherent in a medium to make
it more formal or informal than any other medium. The kind of
informality people agree to attribute to a particular medium, such
as texting, will shape when it is appropriate to use that medium.
While text messages might be too informal for a breakup, they
often had the right level of informality for starting to Hirt with
someone. Women insisted to me that if they met someone who
was interested in them, they would exchange phone numbers, but
24 The Breakup 2.0
only to text each other. Calling would express too much interest;
calling would be too forward a move. But texting was considered
to carry low enough stakes that one could begin an exchange with
the right level of ambiguity, unclear whether the exchange is about
friendship or desire. As Summer suggested in her interview, dis-
cussing the text message she saved that a cute man had sent her a
half hour after their first conversation: "The good thing about tex-
ting is that it's that nice in-between between calling and not doing
anything. It's not so desperate."
It is this very casualness that makes texting a problematic me-
dium for breaking up. One connects to someone initially using
texting because people presume that texting reveals so little about
the depth or seriousness of one's emotions. As a result, it is hardly
appropriate as a medium for breaking up. What is caution in
one's choice of media in the initial contact becomes cowardice at
the end.
Texting's brevity and informality also affects the ways texting is
actually used in a breakup. Here I want to distinguish between media
ideology and practice. When people told me about their media
ideologies of texting, they would stress how inappropriate texting
was as a medium for breaking Up.2 Sometimes, however, when they
talked about how text messages actually played a role in their break-
ups, I got a different sense of how text messages functioned. People
would tell me about choosing to start text-message fights on pur-
pose, ones that sometimes, but not always, led to breakups. People
would prefer text-message fights because, as Rose explained to me,
2. Even the one person I interviewed who thought I was clearly very old- fashioned for suggesting that texting was not acceptable as a breakup medium also told me in detail about how casual many of her relationships were. In this case, part of what seemed to help texting be so acceptable was the ways in which its informality helped to emphasize her relationships' casualness.
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 25
the recipient would focus his or her entire attention on what you
were saying by text and would have to respond to that message.
Rose compared this with face-to-face fights:
I feel like for the most part in [face-to-face] fights, women, like
I said, scream at men, and the men nod like this [demonstrates how the men stare off into space] and nod like this, and [the woman says] "oh, you said this" and you scream at them more for saying it, and they nod. And at the end of the fight you feel better and they
just let it go and everything is okay.
And yet, the woman never really knows whether the nodding man
was actually listening to her. But, as she explained, with a text mes-
sage, the man has to pay attention to the words, and he has to re-
spond to what the woman is saying. Texts, she went on to say, were
always answered. You could delete an e-mail or a voice mail, but
texts require both attention and a response.
Because of this, some people used text messages to begin the
breakup ritual. Texting "I want to breakup" in some cases was only
the mediated version of the face-to-face utterance: "We have to
talk." The possibility of a breakup is promised but not definite.
Instead, texting a wish to breakup in the early evening sometimes
ensured frantic phone calls or long face-to-face conversations until
six in the morning. A text message's very informality, however,
meant uttering the desire to breakup by text might not be taken se-
riously as a desire. Much more conversational work would have to
occur to make the desire become fact. Several people thought that
a text-message breakup wouldn't result in a breakup. Cole said,
"If I texted my girlfriend 'I want to break up with you' I think she
wouldn't take it seriously. She would probably laugh."
I have been discussing the dilemmas of using too informal a
medium for breaking up, but too formal a medium can also be
26 The Breakup 2.0
a problem. Only one person told me about being dumped by
letter-and this on cream stationery written with what she sus-
pected was a quill pen. In this case, it was the very formality of the
letter that bothered Eleanor. She knew the breakup was probably
coming. They had lived in the same dorm, and as long as they
primarily communicated face-to-face, all seemed to go well. He
wouldn't text her and when she texted him, his phone was often
turned off. For the most part, there was no reason to communicate
any other way but face to face-they lived in the same place. But
when they went home for the summer, four hours away from each
other, their communication started to go sour. They kept arguing by
phone. So Eleanor thought a breakup was likely, but did not expect
it by cream stationery. She described in detail, with a mixture of
horror and amusement, the seriousness of tone, the surprise of get-
ting such a formal document in the mail. "Who does that anymore?"
she kept asking. She would have much preferred a phone call.
Cream stationery aside, the medium that most undergraduates
described to me as formal was e-mail. As I mentioned in my intro-
duction, people's media ideologies about e-mail reveal a generation
gap in the ways people understand technology. Even undergradu-
ates who were unhappy with the ways in which new media were
changing people's communication,3 would describe e-mail as the
closest regular form of communication that they had to letters; that
is, to more traditional forms of communication. By contrast with
all the other media they used regularly, e-mail seemed the most
formal, used to communicate with employers, professors, par-
ents, and grandparents. One student, who wanted the pseudonym
3. Many of my interviews had a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the way communication used to be, before texting, e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook, and so on.
L.
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 27
Gunslinger, chatted with me about what he thought about e-mail,
distinguishing between handwritten letters and e-mail:
[In e-mail] Every letter looks the same, they are identical. I push the button, but it wasn't my hand making the note. But it is incred- ibly helpful and it's shrinking the world, and it is so much easier to communicate, blah blah blah, all those wonderful things. So in that sense, e-mail is the best tool. You can clearly think out what you are trying to say as long as you don't write an angry e-mail. But you could just as easily write an angry letter. And as soon as you send it, you regret it, and you try to jam your hand into the blue box, but you can't get it, just like you can't unsend an e-mail. So those two, in that vein they are very similar, in that they both still have their problems, but since we have been writing letters as long as we have been around, we know how to approach them better. Vlhereas in- stant messaging, and texting, they are fairly new technologies so there really is no etiquette.
For the Gunslinger, e-mail and letters gradually became almost in-
terchangeable as he thought about the etiquette challenges each
presented. Other people his age with whom I spoke would also
quickly equate letters and e-mails, viewing them as interchange-
ably formal.
Older people, by contrast, viewed e-mail as informal and de-
scribed the way its informality affected communication. Noah, a
professor of physics in his forties at my university, shared his per-
spective that e-mail was not similar to letters at all but far more
linked to spoken communication:
Because e-mail is so connected to oral communication, we feel like we are saying something quite well when we type it out. And then you can go back to it a day later and you realize-oh, this really wasn't nearly as well-written as I thought it would be, which is not as much an experience I have with sort of conventional typing. The ways
28 The Breakup 2.0
I know it is linked to oral communications is (a) I notice how often
I am saying things out loud as I type them on e-mail, which is not something I do with normal word-processing and (b) the number of times I make phonetic spelling errors. What did I do just a couple
days ago? It would have been potentially embarrassing, I spelled out the word that sounded like what I was saying, but I really meant a dif- ferent word entirely. I don't know if it was "through" or "threw." The
fact that I have seen those kinds of errors written by brilliant scholars makes me realize that this is something about e-mail. People make grammatical and spelling errors in e-mail that they would never make on a memo they were typing on the exact same keyboard.
E-mail is a medium in which media ideologies are most sharply
differentiated along generational lines, with people of Noah's gen-
eration viewing e-mail as informal and people of the Gunslinger's
generation seeing e-mail almost as formal a medium as one can
have, second only to a letter.
Up until now, I have been describing how people's media ideolo-
gies determine the formality of medium. There is nothing intrinsi-
cally formal or informal about a particular medium; it all depends
on what its users decide is formal or informal. However, the rela-
tive formality of a medium is but one small aspect of how media
ideologies affect people's breakup experiences. Breakups make
people focus on other ways different media might affect commu-
nication as well. For example, while people's e-mail ideologies tend
to center around the ways in which they compare e-mail to letters,
people's instant-messaging ideology, by contrast, centers around
the way instant messaging resembles face-to-face conversations.
Is It Like Face-to-Face Conversation?
People are constantly developing their media ideologies through
comparison, attributing certain qualities to one medium because
Fifty 1!\lays to Leave Your Lovcr 29
they are tacitly contrasting it to other media. Thus when people
compared texting with instant messaging, they would talk about
how texting was ever-present and too informal, while instant mes-
saging could offer a textual representation of spoken conversa-
tion. When faced with a hypothetical question such as "\iVhich is
a better medium for breaking up?", people would talk about how
instant messaging allows for conversational turn-taking, how peo-
ple always respond to each other in real-time. People could take
hours to text a response, and one never knew when it would arrive.
An instant messaging response, by contrast, one could see being
typed. Sometimes people mentioned that they could get infor-
mation about the other person's state of mind by the speed and
rhythm of their typing, once they knew the person well enough. In
addition, instant messaging affords the possibility for explanation
and a dialogue in which the person being dumped can ask "why?"
One woman, who requested the pseudonym Duae Vultae, largely
preferred to break up by instant message. She explained why in the
following way:
Duae Vultae: [Most people think] breaking up in person is ideal. But I just think that when it comes to breaking up with someone, if I am sure that I want to break up with someone, then the best
way is to do it through other means.
!lana: So what do you try?
Duae Vultae: I usually just go on instant messenger, and 1 make it
as clear and straightforward as possible. And I leave no room for doubts. Because when you see someone in person, it's harder to bring it up. And once you do bring it up, you arc going to be af- fected by how that person responds to it. You will feel bad. And then you might change your mind based on how that person responds, if they start crying or something like that. But then, through instant messaging, you will just say it, and you won't see
30 The Breakup 2.0
how they react .... Most people think it's very harsh. Somehow it never bothered my conscience that it was just done with. It's probably better for them too. I just don't like to drag out a rela- tionship that I have determined to end.
Ilana: So let me ask you, you are choosing instant messaging. And you have other choices. What is it about instant messaging?
Duae Vultae: Other choices, maybe phone? I could call them. That also makes it more difficult-talking. You know, talking makes it more personal. And then, if I text, its just, I don't know, then I feel like I still need to leave room for a little bit of explanation and text messaging, that would take a long time to respond back. So, or e-mail, now e-mail-I like the immediate response. With instant messaging you can do that. And if they get upset, you can just sign off, and okay, it's done. But then through e-mail, you have to wait to see .... If I am absolutely certain about the breakup, then it's instant messaging.
When people objected to instant messaging, they often pointed
to the way in which 1M might not be enough like spoken conver-
sation. One student in a class of mine said that the problem with
instant messaging was that you never knew if you were the only
person they were talking to at that moment. Because this is on a
computer screen, someone could be breaking up with one person
and hooking up with another at the same time. In short, instant
messaging could not guarantee that someone's whole attention
was on the person they were typing to. Technically this is also true
of e-mail, Facebook, or text messages. But it is the ways that peo-
ple talk about instant messaging and how similar it is to face-to-
face conversations that also makes the differences that they notice
between these two ways of communicating more of a problem.
Another discomfort people had with instant messaging is
that someone could simply end the conversation abruptly and
without any forewarning. When people do this in face-to-face
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 31
conversations, there are bodily movements that give some indica-
tion that this may be about to happen, and perhaps some clues as
to why someone has chosen to end a conversation. By 1M, there
are no such nonverbal clues, so this ending is perceived as much
more abrupt. Olivia told me a story about how her eighth-grade
boyfriend had responded to her desire to breakup over 1M by sim-
ply logging off.
This is when instant messenger was a big part of my life-away messages told about your state of mind. You would put up the quote of a song, and it told if you were happy or sad .... I had this boyfriend and it was eighth grade. He asked me out through his friend, we talked online, and we hung out, like, once, and then I got freaked out. I am not ready for this. I broke up with him online [by 1M]. And then, of course, it's like that is the equivalent of de- activating [Facebook], is the person who signs off without saying anything. It's like "oh my god, are they going to go kill themselves, did they go to cry, or are they pissed off, and they don't care?" ... I re- member what I said, and my heart was pounding. And then he just signed off, and that was his response. I was good friends with his friends, and they told me that he was upset and everything. And he wasn't online for a few days ... so I was worried about him.
Signing off instant messaging without announcing he was going
felt far too vague for Olivia. She was fourteen at the time, and this
was one of the first times she had ever ended a relationship, so she
did not have many past experiences to help place his behavior in
context. And his actions were too ambiguous for her to evaluate
what might be the consequences of her desire to end the relation-
ship. In short, she needed more information about how his media
ideology and his practice coincided to interpret his actions.
I have been describing some of the media ideologies at play
when people break up with each other (and there are many more),
32 The Breakup 2.0
in part to clarify what it means to analyze new media from an eth-
nographic or anthropological perspective. I could discuss the ways
I think a medium functions-whether texting ensures more of an
immediate answer than instant messaging or e-mail, and how that
might affect a breakup-but that would be an interpretation based
on my own assumptions and experiences with technology. People
develop understandings of how media functions based on their
own practices and conversations they have with the people they
know, as well as the stories they hear and see through the media. 4
Their media ideologies always managed to surprise me, and make
me think about the technologies we were talking about in a new
way. People are unpredictable, one can't tell without asking and
observing what media ideologies they hold, and how their beliefs
shape their practices. Some people I talked to thought that a text
message always required a response; others had no problem ig-
noring text messages. Whether texts required response or could be
ignored was part of a person's media ideology; it had nothing to
do with the cell phone equipment. In short, one should not pre-
sume to know the media ideologies that accompany a particular
technology in advance without asking a person many questions to
determine what his or her media ideologies and practices are.
Dating People with Different Media Ideologies
There is a corollary to what I am presenting here-people don't
necessarily share the same media ideologies. Being American,
or a white middle-class American undergraduate is not enough
4. Upon hearing about my project, many people responded by telling me about the Sex and the City episode in which Berger breaks up with Carrie Brad- shaw on a Post-it note.
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 33
information to predict with any degree of accuracy what your
media ideology will be. I realized as I interviewed more and more
people that not only did people have different media ideologies,
but they were often dating people with different media ideologies.
This would occasionally make the breakups more difficult. One
person might think a text message was a perfectly acceptable way
to start a breakup conversation-a conversation that they just as-
sumed would drift to phone or face-to-face conversation before
the end of the night. The other person might be horrified to get the
message by text message and refuse to speak to their now ex-lover
ever again. When I began interviewing people, I expected some
variety in how they understood the ways that media affected mes-
sages. After all, because these media ideologies are ideologies, they
are always multiple, locatable, positioned, and contested. What I
didn't expect was how multiple and how contested all these media
ideologies would be.
In my interviews, people often described having to guess what
other people's media ideologies might be to interpret why they
were using a particular medium to accomplish a certain commu-
nicative task. For example, on Facebook, you can send a public
message by posting to someone's wall so anyone in their Facebook
network can know the content of the message, the author, and the
time it was sent. With a private Facebook message, only the ad-
dresser and addressee can see the message. So Joe invites Jen to
go bowling via a Facebook wall post; should Jen consider this a
date? Why is Joe sending this message so publicly-to make it less
of a date (that is more casual) or more of a date (warning other
people who might be interested in Jen that he, Joe, was pursuing
her)? This particular utterance drove Jen to Joe's profile for any
insight into how Joe understands and uses Facebook. And once
one starts dating, as many readers may have discovered, regular
34 The Breakup 2.0
intimate contact does not necessarily shed comprehensive light
on how another person communicates or interprets the media
through which they are communicating.
The fact that people don't necessarily share media ideologies
means that they don't necessarily agree on how one should use
particular media, either to connect or disconnect with each other.
Yet being able to interpret other people's media ideologies with
any accuracy can affect how your conversations will flow. As I
mentioned before, if two people agree that a text message is too
informal a medium for breaking up, they might decide that a text
message fight containing the stated desire to break up should not
be taken seriously. Only a face-to-face encounter following the
fight can best resolve the argument, and might potentially lead to
reconciliation. But if one person decides that texting is so infor-
mal a medium that any breakup utterance performed within this
medium is unconscionable (as Halle did in the story toward the
beginning of this chapter), then rather than having an imminent
reconciliation, a breakup has just taken place. In short, it is not just
how you think about a medium, it is how you reflexively engage
with the medium given what you think about it.
And Then She Texted Me
Media ideologies are central to explaining one of the striking
features of the stories people told me: People always mentioned
which medium was used whenever they recounted a conversation.
As people of all ages told me breakup stories, they tended to tell
me not only the sequence of events, who said what and when, but
they also always mentioned the media in which each conversa-
tion or message took place. They would point out whenever there
was a switch in medium, letting me know whenever the narrated
Fifty j,Vays to Leave Your Lover 35
conversational exchanges switched from phone to texting, for ex-
ample. At first, I suspected that the people I was intervie\ving were
generously humoring me-they knew I was interested in commu-
nicative technology and so they were willing to seamlessly mark
its presence when they narrated their breakup conversations in an
interview. But once I started paying attention, it became clear that
mentioning the medium is a relatively typical feature of contem-
porary American breakup narratives. All my ti'iends constantly
link the utterance with its communicative medium, and many
breakup narratives featured on radio shows or television or posted
on blogs and other Web sites do as well. Here is a typical example
of what I am describing from the Dumpedster \-\Teb siteS-this was
posted in May 2003:
Alexis asked me out via the Internet. She was cute, and a sci- entist. We went on five dates, but each one seemed like a first date. She let me kiss her, but never really responded. Conversation was so-so. Oh, and on the second date, I met her dad. \Ve had plans for
Memorial Day, but she never called me, and didn't respond to my voice-maiL ... The next day, I got an e-mail apologizing for blowing me off and saying "I needed to give myself a hall pass not to call" and "I don't want to be in a relationship right now."
The Internet, voice mail, e-mail, and hall passes all appear in this
narrative. In their stories, people are tracking the media through
which breakups are unfolding. Why do they do this? Vv11at work is
being done when people retell what was said or typed, while con-
stantly reminding the audience what medium was used?
I'll begin to answer by pointing out something that readers may
have been wondering about. Saying or writing "I want to break
5. The website Dumpedster (www.dumpedster.com) is now defunct.
36 The Breakup 2.0
up" is not necessarily effective: suggesting breaking up does not
actually result in breaking up. People are often ambivalent about
breaking up-one person may want to break up more than the
other, or both people may be uncertain. Clarity on this front can
seem like an elusive achievement. It turns out that the medium
through which "I want to breakup" is uttered contributes to its
effectiveness. Louise, who was in her late twenties, had been in a
seven-year relationship that had begun to contain many ambigu-
ous conversations about whether it should continue or not. These
conversations went on for months, but Louise and her significant
other were still together. Finally her significant other e-mailed her
that he wanted to end the relationship. When Louise reflected on
the breakup, it was the e-mail that she focused on, calling it cow-
ardly, and joking months later that she should have refused the
breakup and instead waited for the text message. In fact, after the
e-mail, she stopped all contact with him. She considered perform-
ing a breakup over e-mail so indicative of his personal failings that
she didn't want to continue interacting.
Before I began this research, I thought that a fairly typical re-
sponse to being dumped by the wrong medium might be to refuse
any further contact with the person ending the relationship. Even
the popular fictional "Text Message Breakup" Youtube video
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcidD2HFK8M) depicts this
response to a breakup e-mail or breakup text as the predictable
response. A woman raps about the social costs her boyfriend/
ex-boyfriend will now pay-namely, never sleeping with anyone
else-because he has breached social norms by breaking up by
text-message after a two-year relationship, the chorus being "You
don't text message breakup:' Yet as I mentioned earlier, for some
college students, a text-message breakup just indicates that the
phone calls or instant messaging will now start. For these people,
I ! I ~ t \ ! I
I ! f,
I f !
I ! ~
! ~ ! I ~
I
I i t
Fifty!Nays to Leave Your Lover 37
a text-message breakup is rarely accomplished solely by texting;
other media would almost immediately be called upon for this
task. Texting a breakup may only be the beginning of the ritual of
breaking up, and in some sense the warning shot across the bow.
Just because you say you want to break up doesn't mean that you
are actually going to break up. You could be having one of many
fights or be about to redefine some of the terms of the relationship,
but ending the relationship is not a given.
Facebook plays an ambiguous role in how it facilitates breaking
up. Sometimes it creates a sharply defined ending. For Leslie, the
Facebook breakup served the same function as e-mail did in my
first interview. Leslie checked her Facebook profile late in the day,
and found out that she was suddenly single. In fact, she learned that
her boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, had a new girlfriend through the
news feed that flashes on as soon as one logs on. And then she
noticed that her profile had changed, that he was no longer listed
as the person she was in a relationship with. This was a Facebook
breakup that was immediately effective. And she said ruefully that
because of the news feed, everyone else knew before she did. In this
case, the medium helped determine whether indicating "I want to
break up" becomes effective over time.
But in other cases the news feed also reveals to people how un-
stable Facebook claims can be-that is, how unstable a person's
single status can be. While some people will claim that a breakup
isn't official until it is "Facebook officiaL" just because it has be-
come Facebook official doesn't mean that it has taken. People will
waiver-one day they announce on Facebook that the relation-
ship is in trouble, the next day they announce that they are back
together. A community's first indication that a relationship is in
trouble is often the rapid changes to a Facebook relationship sta-
tus. So Facebook is a glimpse into other people's disconnections,
38 The Breakup 2. a
but a glimpse that tantalizes instead of satisfying. And what is often
unknown is whether the breakup is going to take-is the news feed
recording a breakup saga or a narrative of renewing commitment,
of near dissolution narrowly averted? Which kind of story will the
breakup statement on Facebook eventually contribute to when the
events become a story that circulates?
I want to suggest that because people don't share the same media
ideologies, especially about new media, part of what someone is
doing by marking every medium in their story is tracing the detec-
tive work they had to do to determine which genre of story this nar-
rative was going to become as it unfolded. The interactions might
be a relationship fight leading to renewed commitment, or they
might signal a breakup. Each person's intentions are unclear, and
can only be retroactively guessed at by seeing how what they say and
what they do align. One of the clues that people focus on as they try
to guess in hindsight what was going on is the medium that each
person uses. Their choice of media can be read as formal or infor-
mal, enabling intonation or devoid of intonation, allowing for con-
versational turn-taking or preventing it, public or private, and so
on. By recounting the medium used, people can gain some insight
into other people's media ideologies, and often people realize that
these media ideologies are not shared in the moment of a breakup.
The question "Why would anyone text that?" is a good indication
that people are not sharing the same media ideology about texting.
Idioms of Practice
People's media ideologies contribute to why they mention the
medium of a message as they tell the stories of their breakups.
They are explaining the message-people's media ideologies en-
sure that the same sentences are interpreted and experienced dif-
ferently when read on a computer screen or on a cell phone. There
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 39
is another reason, though, that marking the medium contributes
to the detective work of trying to understand a breakup: People
have what I am calling different idioms of practice, a term I men-
tioned in the introduction. Groups of friends, classes, workers in
an office will develop together their ov\'n ways of using media to
communicate with each other. Sometimes they realize that their
way of using a medium is distinctive, that it marks them as differ-
ent from other people. Sometimes they don't perceive that their
use of a medium is unique until some miscommunication or un-
expected way someone was communicating made it clear (often
unpleasantly clear) that others have different idioms of practice.
Two main reasons emerged from the interviews to explain why
there are so many idioms of practice with new media right now,
why people keep discovering that there isn't a general consensus
about how or if to use different media to accomplish different
communicative tasks, such as breaking up. First, because these are
new media, people haven't had time to develop a widespread con-
sensus about how to use a medium, especially for relatively rare
communicative tasks such as breaking up. As Lisa Gitelman, a his-
torian of media, points out, things we now take for granted about
the telephone took a while to be established.
Inventing, promoting, and using the first telephones involved lots of self-conscious attention to telephony. But today, people con- verse through the phone without giving it a moment's thought.
The technology and all of its supporting protocols (that you an- swer "Hello?" and that you pay the company, but also standards like touch-tones and twelve-volt lines) have become self-evident as
the result of social processes, including the habits associated with other, related media. (Gitelman 2006, 5-6)
As Gitelman explains, much of what we take for granted about
older communicative technology like the telephone had to be
40 The Breakup 2.0
Relationship Status:
Interested in:
Looking for:
e- Sinqle
Engaged Married It's Complicated IrlCln_9IJeflBelationship
o A Relationship D Networking
li ! ;
Political Views: J Religious Views: I
Save Changes
FIGURE 2
Choosing a Relationship Status When you want to indicate that you are no longer in a relation- ship on Facebook, you have two choices. You can either delete your relationship status entirely or you can choose the "single" option from the Facebook relationship status menu.
established. Saying "hello" was a phrase Thomas Edison had to
invent and convince others to use instead of Alexander Graham
Bell's suggestion-"ahoy:'
Second, communicating with these new media can present so-
cial dilemmas that people have to solve-and will often try to fig-
ure out with their friends. I am not blaming the designers of these
media. You can cancel your relationship on Facebook by changing
your relationship status on Facebook. Facebook asks you directly
if you want to cancel the relationship. I don't think that the people
designing Facebook are at fault when someone can't bear to press
"cancel;' and so has to turn to her roommate to help her click.
People's communicative needs are so varied and unpredictable
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 41
that they are constantly facing the question of how best to use
a particular medium given its structure and their media ideolo-
gies. And in these moments, as they develop strategies for com-
municating to solve specific problems (such as having someone
else press "confirm"), they are fashioning their own idioms of
practice.
I have talked earlier about people's different answers to the
question: Who changes the relationship status on Facebook after
a breakup (and thus in 2008 forced the other person to face the
broken-heart icon on their profile)? The fact that when I ask a group
of undergraduates I always get so many different answers suggests
that there are many different idioms of practice, and no shared
consensus. Even people's choice of words for certain activities in-
dicates that people have different idioms of practice. In media sto-
ries about quitting Facebook (i.e., closing your Facebook account),
journalists and bloggers often call this practice "Facebook suicide."
No one I interviewed used this phrase; they tended to call it "deac-
tivating" their Facebook account. When I introduced them to the
term Facebook suicide, they sometimes responded with great glee.
Facebook suicide, after all, is catchier.
Deleting Facebook Friends: Different
Idioms of Practice
In my interviews with college students, Facebook emerged as
the primary medium that people used in very different ways and
often they did not seem to have a shared consensus on how to
use the medium. This is partially because Facebook is more recent
(2004) than the other mediums that college students were using to
end relationships. Ending Facebook friendships turned out to be
another instance in my interviews in which people had different
42 The Breakup 2.0
idioms of practice. A person can cancel a Facebook friendship by
clicking on an X near the Facebook friend's name. Once the person
clicks to cancel the friendship, Facebook asks: "Remove friend? Are
you sure you want to remove Harry Potter as a friend? This cannot
be undone. Harry Potter will not be notified." You then have to
confirm that you do indeed want to cancel the Facebook friend-
ship. Some people said they never defriended anyone on Facebook.
As the Gunslinger puts it:
If someone angers me, I just don't talk to them. It is so trivial to have them no longer associated with you on the Internet. I mean, I am trying to put this in a more base term-when you look at someone, it won't say friends in common-the Gunslinger and "so and so." So many people are going: "They're friends? I thought they didn't like each other." But what is the point?
The Gunslinger, and others, thought that Facebook friends means
so little that defriending was an excessive act of hostility. Intrigu-
ingly, other people had regular bouts of defriending friends, and
gave exactly the same reason for these purges: that Facebook
friends don't really matter. Rosie described how she regularly goes
through and defriends some of her Facebook friends:
Ilana: What about defriending?
Rosie: I just do it. I had so many friends on Facebook, and I didn't even really know them alL I mean, I knew them, but they weren't of any real importance to me. So I went through a defriending purge, spree actually. And I went from 700 friends and I have like 56 now.
Ilana: vVhen did you do this?
Rosie: Over the last year, probably. I went through one [purge] where I deleted all the fake Facebook profiles, like Bruce
Fifty Ways to Lcove Your Lover
Buckeye, Brad Pitt, that kind of thing. Then I started going through high school, people I don't talk to from high schooL There are a lot.
Ilana: Did you get any comments about this?
Rosie: No, I never had anybody try to re-friend me. So I am guess- ing that they didn't even realize that I did it. Or they just didn't care, in which case I didn't need to be friends with them on Face- book anyway. My rule now is that I periodically go through my friends list and I ask: "okay, have I talked to this person in the last couple of months? No. Okay. Should I get rid of them? Prob- ably." There are some people that I don't talk to on a regular basis that I keep on there. For the most part, if I don't talk to them on a regular basis, or interact with them in real life, J probably don't keep those friends on Facebook or MySpace.
43
Both Rosie and the Gunslinger are addressing the same social di-
lemma: how they should best maintain a social network whose
members have privileged access to their profile and often circulate
too much information (people's news feed could be too packed
with information about people they don't know well or care
about).6 Some people felt that to be a Facebook friend was so min-
imal a link that to deny someone this link was especially rude-the
metaphorical equivalent of refusing to say "how are you doing?"
to a friend of a friend, someone you barely knmv and pass on the
street. Others do not want to clutter their network (and news feed)
with people they don't know well.
Some people broadcast their personal information so often
that even reluctant defrienders will cut the link. Paul, who rarely
6. At the time that I was interviewing, Facebook did nUl allow you to choose whether or not a Facebook friend's information would appear in your news feed.
This changed in 2009.
44 The Breakup 2.0
defriends on Facebook, decided to remove someone from another
networking site, his livejournal blog network (www.livejournal.
com) because she wrote so much that his livejournal page was
filled only with her entries and no one else's.
Paul: So this was on livejournal. This wasn't on Facebook, this was on livejournal. It's basically a public diary ... a blog that works a little differently because you can basically create communities. It was a big thing in high school, a big big thing in high school. And when you write something down, you put up a post if you are friends with someone. Then on your friends' page, your post will be there. She would post all the time, like maybe five times a day. And it is supposed to be like once a day, maybe three times a week. That sort of daily or less ballpark. She would post five times a day! So my friends' page would be cluttered with all her posts. I still liked her as a friend, but I couldn't have that many things cluttering up my friends' page. So I took her off, we aren't livejournal friends anymore.
Ilana: Did you tell her?
Paul: I don't think so. We were in drum line [in the band] together. We weren't close enough to talk all the time. We were within the same friends' circle, which was part of the reason why I didn't want her cluttering up my friends' page. You know, friend of a friend. So I don't think I actually told her that. I am not sure that she knows. I imagine that she knows. At the same time, she has five hundred livejournal friends.
Paul put a lot of thought into figuring out whether or not this
might offend her. He decided that they didn't know each other all
that well, that this wasn't a violation of tacit friendship expecta-
tions. He also decided that she was unlikely to value him all that
highly either, given how many livejournal friends she had. He
hoped that one less link out of five hundred links surely could not
matter that much to her, but this was all guesswork on Paul's part.
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 45
Of course sometimes people do defriend each other out of
anger. It is even more of a statement when there are ditTerent idi-
oms of practice involved, when someone defriends another who
believes that a Facebook friend is a minimal acknowledgment of
a social connection, and thus would never defriend anyone. This
happened to Sadie, who would never defriend anyone, as she ex-
plains in response to my question: How did she know she had been
defriended?
Sadie: She had already decided a week before, two weeks, maybe three weeks that she didn't want to be my friend, but she didn't tell me in person. So not everyone is like this particular person.
But it was surreal.
Ilana: How did you know that it was weeks earlier?
Sadie: I am just guessing. It could have been tbe day before, it could have been three weeks before. Because I hadn't bad an oc- casion to message her. And ber profile badn't cbanged, maybe her profile badn't changed in a couple of weeks. Since that is another way that you find out. It was very unsettling. I was sort of like "wait, wbat? Did you seriously defriend me?" And at that point I was angry, because she was disagreeing witb me, but she was still talking to me an hour beforeband. And I had had other conversations with her. She wasn't super-friendly, and she was sort of strange. I didn't really notice it until I saw this and knew that sbe didn't want to be my friend anymore.
In this case, the fact that the people involved had different idioms
of practice surrounding Facebook friending and defriending made
this defriending meaningful and painful.
I interviewed someone else for whom friending or defriending
had little to do with being acquaintances and much more to do
with how people circulate knowledge. Noelle told me that when
she was curious about someone on Facebook, she would request to
46 The Breakup 2.0
be their friend. They tended to say yes; people often friended other
people they suspected that they vaguely knew. She would then
look at their profile, figure out what she wanted to know, and then
promptly defriend them.
Ilana: How do you decide whether to friend someone or not?
Noelle: Oh, sometimes if I want to be nosy, I want to look at the wall, but if you can't, I will friend somebody, and see what I have to see, and then delete them as a friend. I do that all the time, if I want to look at their pictures or something, just to be nosy, and then I just defriend them.
I must admit, when Noelle told me this, my first thought was,
"Well, that's a different idiom of practice." No one else I inter-
viewed would friend and defriend quite like that. Several of the
people I had already interviewed would be horrified at the idea
of someone doing this, but just as many might wish that they had
thought of it themselves.
The wide range of idioms of practice I was encountering in in-
terviews occasionally made for some awkward interview moments.
When I was talking to college students about their use of communi-
cative technology, I didn't want to introduce them to new techniques;
I just wanted to find out what they did. But I would occasionally, to
my surprise, find myself explaining or unwittingly warning people
about others' practices. For example, I often asked students about
fake Facebook profiles, which I had first learned about from one
interviewee as a technique to find out who one's ex~lover is now
dating without revealing that you want to know. In short, a fake
Facebook profile can be an asset in one's Facebookstalking (more on
Facebook stalking in chapter 4). But sometimes students were
surprised to find out from my questions that fake Facebook pro-
files existed that weren't obvious jokes. In this, and other similar
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 47
moments, I unwittingly stumbled across the fact that I was inter-
viewing college students with numerous idioms of practice.
I have been trying to write from a nonjudgmental standpoint
on people's various idioms of practice because I believe that one
person's media ideology and use of technology is no better or
worse than another's. This is the privilege and obligation of ana-
lyzing people's practices. Being a good analyst of others' practices
involves accepting the validity of others' perspectives. This isn't a
stance you can easily or comfortably take when you are constantly
communicating with people with different idioms of practice. As
an analyst, I was encountering people's different uses of technol-
ogy as stories, not as practices that affected me personally. I am
able to analyze and write without judging other people's behavior
as ethical-a luxury that people in the thick of things don't have.
It is not surprising that in my interviews, people were constantly
making moral judgments. They felt strongly that some ways of
using technology were wrong. For example, in response to my
question about what Facebook's relationship status option "it's
complicated" might mean, Keith said:
Dumb! Dumb! Why? I don't know ... like I just feel like it is so trivial and so childish. What are you telling people like when you put that up there? No, I am not interested in your advances because I kind of got this thing going on with someone. Well then, just like ... just remove it, just take it all off. And if people are unsure, you should be enough of an adult ... you should have enough social skills to be able to give someone a sign that like 'hey, that's really sweet of you-not interested, got some stuff going on.' You need to do it through 'it's complicated' on Facebook? Really?
Not everyone I interviewed was as outspoken or funny in their
critique as Keith, but most people had strong senses of what is an
appropriate or inappropriate use of technology.
48 The Breakup 2.0
As people develop their solutions to social quandaries with
their friends, they also are developing ethical expectations, senses
of right and wrong technological uses. Just as there aren't widely
shared idioms of practice, or media ideologies, there also aren't
widely shared ethical evaluations of media use. What people are
trying to figure out are the ethics of how to end the relationship
as they break up with people and then tell their friends stories
about their breakups.
How people understand the media they use shapes the ways they
will use it. As a result, determining people's media ideologies is
crucial when you are trying to figure out the ways that people
communicate through different technologies. Often, people take
for granted their own assumptions about how a medium shapes
the information transmitted. They don't always realize that their
way of using communicative technology is but one of many ways,
that what they focus on as important features of a medium may
not be generally held to be the important features. This is less often
the case when the communicative technologies have been around
for a while. Over time, people's practices can change from being
idioms to widely accepted practices. When media is relatively new,
the medium itself can pose social quandaries for people when they
try to use it to accomplish particular tasks. People will talk to their
friends, coworkers, and families about these dilemmas, trying to
figure out solutions collectively. In these moments, they are devel-
oping idioms of practice. But these are still relatively small groups
deciding together how to deal with a particular problem of so-
cial etiquette. It takes time for people to develop widely agreed
on strategies to use different media, especially to accomplish emo-
tionally charged social tasks.
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover 49
In the next two chapters, I discuss at greater length what people
focus on as they develop their media ideologies-the structure of
communicative technologies and a technology's relationship to
other mediums. To understand other people's media ideologies,
one has to figure out two primary aspects. First, what structures of
that particular medium matter for people, and when do those
structures matter? People aren't going to care all that much if a cell
phone has bad reception when they are making small talk. But bad
reception can become much more significant when it is happening
during a breakup conversation. When ending a relationship, call-
ing on a cell phone can become interpreted as a sign of disrespect
because of the static. In other contexts, a cell phone call would be
perfectly acceptable.
Second, people understand a particular medium only in the con-
text of other media. People's media ideologies about e-mail, for ex-
ample, change if they begin to text others regularly. When people
start using a new technology, they change their understandings of
all the other technologies they use as well. One cannot understand
people's media ideology for one medium in isolation. One has to
take into account their media ideologies for all the media they use,
and analyze how these media ideologies are interwoven.
