Paul Marks, senior technology reporter
(Image: Andy Kingsbury/Corbis)
I am not particularly prone to earbugs, but Jimmy Ruffin's emotive Motown classic What Becomes of the Brokenhearted began playing in my mind when I came across this intriguingly titled research paper last week: "Design for forgetting: Disposing of digital possessions after a breakup".
Yes, I know it’s Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air. For people who have recently suffered a break-up, though, it’s a tough day to get through - and this research shows how social technologies are making it tougher still. It asks if the "huge collections of digital possessions" couples now acquire in latter-day, online-social-media-rich relationships make breaking up, er, hard to do.
It seems it does, as Corina Sas at Lancaster University in the UK and Steve Whittaker of the University of California, Santa Cruz, are due to tell a computer interaction conference - which, appropriately, takes place in April in Paris. The pair asked 24 people who had recently split with their lovers how they dealt with the digital detritus of their affair - texts, emails, music, video clips, Facebook messages or photos - stored across multiple gadgets, from computers to mobile phones, cameras and even digital picture frames.
Perhaps not too surprisingly they found their subjects developed a variety of "digital disposal" strategies, depending on the degree of hurt. That has led the researchers to suggest ways in which the likes of Facebook could develop novel features to help newly split couples better manage what they call "digital forgetting".
The 24 subjects revealed three main break-up strategies, Sas says: "Some people tended to keep too much digital content, leaving them subjected to painful reminiscences. Others impulsively deleted digital possessions they may later want. Still others engaged in immediate discontinued use and later selective disposal."
Whittaker adds: "Many people make multiple mistakes when they dispose of digital possessions: some immediately delete too impulsively but later regret not keeping stuff."
Your digital relationship is more difficult to dispose of than burning love letters in days of yore, and your Twitters and Facebooks are the major bugbear. The relationship traces we leave on social networking systems "could be particularly difficult to remove and emotionally taxing when accidentally revisited", Sas says.
"Some of the greatest problems related to interactions and content in Facebook where couples were constantly reminded of their ex. Unless they unfriend them, partners could easily see what the ex is up to."
To the rescue, of course, comes even more technology.
Sas and Whittaker would like to see Facebook offer more "couple-oriented" features that make it easier to erase a couple's joint content later - a kind of digitally mediated pre-nup. That might get over the problem of having relationship material present on other friends’ pages, outside your control but still visible to you.
They also propose development of - and get this for ambition - automatic relationship-information harvesting software. "This tool would gather together all the digital possessions relating to the ex in one place. At the moment possessions are spread across laptops, phones, Facebook, et cetera, so it's hard to hide or delete everything about the ex," says Whittaker.
They realise this is no trivial task - but it's worth the effort, they believe. Automatically hoovering up a couple's digital pictures, emails and text messages would require a raft of artificial-intelligence techniques, from face recognition to machine learning and "entity extraction". "That would generate a unified set of digital possessions that can be later dealt with appropriately," says Sas.
In the meantime, her advice is to quell the red mist re the digital stuff post break-up. "Keeping or deleting everything may be tempting, but acting on such impulses may not the best approach in the long run. Instead try to create some immediate distance from digital possessions and revisit them later to choose only the most memorable ones." Rather like putting your old photos in a tin until you’ve cooled off, then.
If not, to quote Jimmy Ruffin, "all that's left is an unhappy ending".
Paper reference: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems (in press)
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