We talk a lot about the privacy repercussions of sharing photos and personal information online, but there are other unintended consequences. One of them might be extra heartache.
According to trends in Facebook use and status updates, American Thanksgiving kicks off high season for calling it quits with your significant other. It could be the pressure of hometown visits to meet the parents, or it could be a subconscious desire to take stock of your life and start fresh with the new year.
Thanksgiving marks the starting line in a race through commitment milestones: Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's Day and Valentine's Day.
And for better or worse, there seems to be a growing number of startups and apps trying to help us break up.
For the truly soulless, The Breakup Shop will text or email your partner for just $10, letting them know it's over. A letter will cost you double.
Is this what social media has done to us? Harvesting our data to predict when we're likely to break up, and then giving us the tools to do it, without ever having to look each other in the eye?
And if you are the subject of a breakup app, there are also apps for counselling after the relationship ends. Rx Breakup will coach you through the first 30 days of being dumped. The app claims to help you get over a recent breakup or "lingering obsession," saying the plan is professionally developed and counsels you "in the tone of a trusted girlfriend."
Post-breakup apps, too
Unfortunately, the breakup itself isn't even the hardest part of the whole modern love conundrum. The really hard part is what happens after the breakup. We may have apps to do our dirty work, but we're still human, and mending a broken heart takes time.
Well … it turns out there's an app for that, too.
Technology writer Kashmir Hill says sometimes it seems as though the social network knows us better than we know ourselves. (Flickr/Thomas Angermann)
Knowing what was in store for commitment-phobes at holiday time, just as the shopping malls started playing Jingle Bells, Facebook launched a tool, currently available only in the U.S., for helping users handle breakups.
After all, as technology writer Kashmir Hill says, sometimes it seems as though the social network knows us better than we know ourselves.
"It's kind of unbelievable that Facebook exists today. There's this place where everyone goes to enter their name, to put lots of photos of themselves, to say what they do, and to kind of keep daily updates of their lives. This is something that would have been really kind of scary to people if you described this thing to them 20 years ago as this database of everybody, and all of their likes and all of their friends. It's kind of almost mind-blowing," said Hill.
Before you even know you're breaking up, the all-knowing social network can now give you the resources to manage your memories to help you mend your broken heart.
The FOMO effect
Worst of all, in the middle of that devastating breakup, your social media feed will make it seem as though everyone else you know is falling in love. And getting engaged. And announcing pregnancies.
Social media fosters the FOMO effect — the fear of missing out. The nature of the online user experience is that when you're scrolling through updates, chances are you're home, in your pyjamas, eating ice cream out of the container. Everyone else, everyone posting photos and updates, seems to be travelling and vacationing and celebrating.
So how did it all come to this?
"Every comment that you leave behind, every email that you write, every chat that you have starts to accumulate and create this archive of who you are," Hill said.
We've been sharing every aspect of our lives with friends and family for over a decade. We talk a lot about the privacy implications of all of our posting online, but there are other unintended consequences, not least of which is the complicated nature of modern romance and breakups.
Maybe now it's time to think through how much we really want to share, and how many of our personal memories we really do want archived.
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét