• Ilana Gershon deposited The Breakup 2.1: The ten-year update on Humanities Commons 5 years, 5 months ago

    Since 2007–2008, American undergraduates’ media ecology has changed dramatically without an accompanying transformation in how they use media to end relationships. The similarities in people’s breakup practices between 2008 and 2018 reveal that, regardless of what social media is used, American undergraduates turn to media in moments of breakup as ways to manage three complicated aspects of ending a relationship: untangling all the ways in which people signal intertwined lives, deciphering the quotidian unknowable of another person’s mind, and trying to control who knows what when. This paper explores how rapid shifts in media ecologies may change the ways in which conventionalization around social practices emerges, leading to more norms oriented around what all media accomplish, rather than generating norms around the affordances of a specific medium.