Social media makes forgetting breakups harder

The proliferation of social media has
made getting over a romantic breakup a
bigger chore than in the bygone era,
even though digital photos and emails
can be deleted in no time.
According to a study, ubiquitous digital
records of a once beloved keep lurking
on Facebook, tumblr, and flicker, makes
it difficult to forget painful memories.
Steve Whittaker, a psychology professor
at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in
human-computer interaction, said
people are keeping huge collections of
digital possessions, and there has been
little exploration of the negative role of
digital possessions when people want to
forget aspects of their lives.
In a paper, "Design for Forgetting:
Disposing of Digital Possessions after a
Breakup," Whittaker and co-author
Corina Sas, of Lancaster University,
examine the challenges of digital
possessions and their disposal after a
romantic breakup. Sas worked on the
research as a visiting professor at UCSC.
Digital possessions include photos,
messages, music, and video stored
across multiple devices such as
computers, tablets, phones, and
cameras. Their pervasiveness "creates
problems during a breakup, as people
''inhabit'' their digital space where
photos and music constantly remind
them about their prior relationship, the
study states. In interviews with 24
young people between the ages of 19
and 34, Whittaker and Sas found that
digital possessions after a breakup are
often evocative and upsetting, leading
to distinct disposal strategies.
Twelve of the subjects were deleters;
eight were keepers, and four others
were selective disposers. Disposal is
made more difficult today because
digital possessions are in vast
collections spread across multiple
devices, applications, web-services, and
platforms, the study further states.
Whittaker and Sas propose that
software solutions might help scrub
cyberspace of painful memories, for
instance automatic "harvesting" using
facial recognition, machine learning or
entity extraction.