Ilana Gershon (Communication and Culture, Indiana
University)
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Media Ideologies and Media Switching
Ending romantic relationships takes social labor, and often considerable labor. And nowadays there are so many ways to end relationships. One can text someone "it's over." One can change one's Facebook profile from "in a relationship" to "single." Or one can leave a voice mail, or have a typed conversation by instant messaging. The ideal remains co-present conversations, but in actual practice, people have many conversations and use a wide variety of media as they disentangle from lovers. Why does it matter if the conversational labor occurs by text message, by Facebook or face-to-face? A breakup is a breakup. Yet for many in the United States, how people break up is as important to them as the fact that they break up. In this talk, I examine the complex interpretations people have developed to explain how a medium affects a message. I analyze the labor different new media requires when disentangling to reflect on how the "newness" of new media is constructed.
Ending romantic relationships takes social labor, and often considerable labor. And nowadays there are so many ways to end relationships. One can text someone "it's over." One can change one's Facebook profile from "in a relationship" to "single." Or one can leave a voice mail, or have a typed conversation by instant messaging. The ideal remains co-present conversations, but in actual practice, people have many conversations and use a wide variety of media as they disentangle from lovers. Why does it matter if the conversational labor occurs by text message, by Facebook or face-to-face? A breakup is a breakup. Yet for many in the United States, how people break up is as important to them as the fact that they break up. In this talk, I examine the complex interpretations people have developed to explain how a medium affects a message. I analyze the labor different new media requires when disentangling to reflect on how the "newness" of new media is constructed.
