For Jane Austen, the lives of ordinary men and women in provincial towns could be the stuff of great drama, because those lives were themselves dramatic—they were lived largely in public, and involved a constant performance of roles. To be a woman, in particular, meant negotiating the boundaries of gentility and commonness, virtue and disgrace, with all eyes upon you. Make a mistake in the social script, and you could be damned to spinsterhood, or worse. Today, in our more liberated and anonymous society, there is only one phase of life when our romantic and sexual lives are so open to public scrutiny, when social status is totally determined by public opinion. That is in adolescence, in high school and college, where young people are packed together in an artificial society, and turn their fiercely judgmental gazes on one another. As the movie Clueless showed, Jane Austen in high school makes a profound dramatic sense.
The Breakup 2.0, a limited but very intriguing new study by Ilana Gershon, suggests that for teenagers, the explosion of new social media over the last few years is making the 21st century even more like the 19th. Drawing on interviews with undergraduates at Indiana University, where she teaches, Gershon sketches a new social world that is mostly invisible to anyone who graduated college before, say, 2000. The simplest way to describe this new world is to say that it involves a much greater reliance on technology in conducting personal relationships. E-mail, blogs, text messages, and Facebook status updates are now as important as phone calls or even actual conversations. Older readers might find this disturbing, a sign that human life is becoming ever more mediated and alienated. It is hard not to shudder when Gershon quotes a student who mentions talking "on face-to-face," as though this were just another technological option.
But the truth, as Gershon shows, is that in important ways all these new media are actually making college-age love affairs more traditional—that is, more governed by strict etiquette, and more accountable to the judgments of peers. Is it rude to break up with someone by text message? If you text your boyfriend that you want to break up, does that itself constitute a break-up, or is it just an overture to a longer process? If you do break up, do you change your Facebook status to "single" right away, or should you tell your best friends about it first, so they won't find out on their Facebook news feeds? If your IM away message quotes dark or cynical lyrics, does that mean you are depressed about a break-up, or just that you like the song?
As Gershon discovers, college students have very definite views about all these questions—just as Elizabeth Bennet would have been quite definite about whether an unmarried woman is permitted to dance several times with the same man at a ball. (Significantly, three times more women than men responded to Gershon's request for interviews. Now as then, it seems, sexual etiquette presses more closely on women.) In both cases, the reason is the same: when life is being led in public, every word and gesture is open to criticism.
Indeed, Facebook, Gershon notes, is implicitly conservative in its sexual morality. It assumes that monogamy is the ideal, and encourages couples to link to one another's profiles—a 21st-century equivalent of "pinning," a way of announcing one's relationship to the world. "Why does it matter if you break up by text message, by Facebook, or face to face?" Gershon asks at the end of The Breakup 2.0. "It matters because people are social analysts of their own lives"—which is, as Jane Austen might have said, a truth universally acknowledged.
--Adam Kirsch
In her surprisingly gripping first book, Gershon argues that Facebook and other forms of new media social networking have radically changed the playing field of accepted interactions. Generations navigate these new forms differently and a whole new set of norms is being developed to judge behavior. No subject has dominated the discussion more than the ways in which we handle romantic relationships: when they begin, when to go public, and how to bring them to an end. Do people really break up via text message? The answer is yes, and Gershon asserts that in this case "the medium is at odds with the message." A professor of communications, the author takes a distinctly academic approach, lending legitimacy to what might otherwise be easily dismissed. She understands how new media shapes social communications and addresses its constant evolution. Readers interested in communication theory and new media evolution will appreciate the author's excellent balance of analysis, anecdote, and readability. While some of her insights will undoubtedly be dated the moment this book hits the shelves, her examination will stand as an important time capsule in a constantly-evolving world.
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"The Breakup 2.0 is intriguing and illuminating. By exploring how college students use Facebook, cell phones, and IM, Gershon deepens our understanding of these media, of young people's lives, and of our evolving definitions of public and private. It's an original and enlightening book."
Breaking up is hard to do, and, as Ilana Gershon observes, it can be even harder when technology is brought into the mix. Gershon interviewed over 70 people (many of them college students) to examine how they used chatting, email, texting, and social networking websites in conjunction with their relationships and found that opinions and social rules governing the intersection of romance and technology are still highly variable. Why would some people rather break up through email, while others prefer instant messaging? What kind of problems arise when a couple has different ideas about how to digitally negotiate the end of their relationship? How do the social and public aspects of sites like Facebook affect one's actions during a relationship and after its dissolution? Mindful of the complicated nature of the topic, Gershon never attempts to define which behaviors are right or wrong but instead concentrates on exploring the ways people think about these tools and what their beliefs show about society's responses to technology. Though written with an academic focus, this is an intriguing read for anyone interested in how social conventions for new media develop and the ways that technology is changing romantic relationships.
-- "Library Journal"
In her surprisingly gripping first book, Gershon argues that Facebook and other forms of new media social networking have radically changed the playing field of accepted interactions. Generations navigate these new forms differently and a whole new set of norms is being developed to judge behavior. No subject has dominated the discussion more than the ways in which we handle romantic relationships: when they begin, when to go public, and how to bring them to an end. Do people really break up via text message? The answer is yes, and Gershon asserts that in this case 'the medium is at odds with the message.' A professor of communications, the author takes a distinctly academic approach, lending legitimacy to what might otherwise be easily dismissed. She understands how new media shapes social communications and addresses its constant evolution. Readers interested in communication theory and new media evolution will appreciate the author's excellent balance of analysis, anecdote, and readability.
-- "Publishers Weekly"