Hello my name is Anthony Pinter and along with my co-author Jed Brubaker
I'm excited to present briefly about our CSCW 2022 paper entitled "Behold The Once
and Future Me Online Identity After the End of a Romantic Relationship.
Now as the title suggests this is a paper about the
ends of romantic relationships but specifically it is about how people
manage data representations of those relationships after they've ended.
In order for data to exist of course those relationships must first form. Two people must
decide they are romantically involved and in many cases exclusively dating or exclusively together.
As two people begin any type of relationship that relationship becomes steadily more represented
online via data. For instance the very act of following or friending creates a datafied
connection and the subsequent pictures and posts further solidify that connection.
This data, the possessions and connections that exist online, help define our identity
being in a relationship with someone else. Similar to offline possessions like pictures
or a couch bought together, they reaffirm our identity in relation to another person.
in other words they create an identity of we in addition to identities of me.
Of course when relationships end that data might remain online. They can create identity
representations of we's that no longer exist thus data management in the wake of a breakup
is important for reconstituting one's identity from a we to a me and moving on from the breakup.
Moreover it can be important in controlling what data is available for algorithmic curation
and recommendation which can be important after experiencing a life transition like
a breakup to prevent people from having painful reminders given to them on social media sites.
In this paper we investigated how people managed that left
behind data and how that management resulted in post-breakup identities.
To do so we interviewed 11 women who had gone through breakups. In the
remainder of this talk I use quotes from 5 of the 11 to illustrate our
findings but quotes and experiences from all 11 appear in the full paper.
Our participants ranged in age from 18 to 30 years
old and had experienced a breakup sometime between 2020 and mid-2021.
The relationships that they were in ranged in length from 8 to 72 months and all of the
relationships were geographically proximate, were not marriages, and had not resulted in children.
We conducted semi-structured narrative interviews with our participants,
asking them to tell us stories about their breakup
and what they did with their possessions and their connections after the breakup.
In our findings we saw distinctions between physical possessions and real world connections
that participants had to others and their digital representations on social media sites.
First possessions -- possessions offline are the objects left behind. Digital possessions
then are the pictures and posts that are left up on social media. Our analysis revealed five
factors that influenced our participants decision making around managing their digital possessions.
These were residual memories a possession could spur, the audiences who could see the possession,
the intentionality involved in viewing a possession, the value position held, and the ease
at which a possession could be reproduced. I'll talk briefly about three of these -- audiences,
intentionality, and replicability -- although we go into detail on all five in the full paper.
First, audiences. Digital possessions that go unmanaged remain accessible to
one's audiences in ways the physical physical possessions did not. Managing possessions then
became a way of implicitly indicating that a relationship was over. By removing possessions
one could signal to their audiences that the relationship had ended because the
audience might notice the sudden absence of the possessions from one's profile.
Kerry rationalized her ex's behavior in this way, reasoning that that is why he deleted
all the photos of her from his social media platform, saying since he didn't use social
media as much I think more of his profile than mine was pictures of us and so if you're trying
to move on and date someone new that might not be the best presence you're putting out
there for someone new wanting to date you so I can understand deleting the photos from social media.
Next intentionality -- digital possessions are viewable at any time and place so long as one has
an internet connection. While our participants did not often go back and look at their digital
possessions, they were subject to moments of algorithmically encouragement reminiscence,
something they didn't have to contend with when it came to their physical possessions.
When experiencing an unexpected moment of algorithmetically driven reminiscence
Elizabeth said that it's not a bad thing just some kind of twinge of a feeling nothing that
sets me back in my day or anything like that. However this was not always the
case. Other participants described deep visceral reactions to moments of unexpected reminiscence,
things that set them back in their day in contrast to Elizabeth.
And finally replicability -- digital possessions are replicable unlike their physical counterparts.
It's possible for possession to exist in multiple places at once online although the quality of each
copy may vary. For instance a copy of a photo may exist as an Instagram post and be accompanied by
likes and comments. Another version of the photo might exist on that individual's camera roll but
without the additional metadata. Participants considered the replicable nature of possessions
and making decisions about what to do with it. For example Adeline who used her Instagram to
lay out her photos said that she deleted the photos of her ex from Instagram so she didn't
have to see them but kept them their camera roll which she was less likely to look at.
Our participants also describe managing connections to others
online. These are data representing Friending or Following; being connected to another account
representative of another person. In the wake of their breakups our participants
described managing connections to their ex, their ex's family, and their ex's friends.
I'll detail each of these. First the ex -- many of our participants didn't disconnect
from their ex. They wanted to remain friends or honor that there had been a relationship.
However, others did disconnect as a way of seeking space to heal or move on.
Henny here exemplified both desires -- she wanted to remain connected to her ex, saying I felt like
we could be friends and you know kind of move on still be a positive presence in each other's life,
but she ultimately disconnected from her ex because her ex was just refusing
to have that outlook with me, and she wanted her ex to get over the
breakup and saw disconnecting as a way of accomplishing that goal.
Second the ex's family. Most participants removed connections to their ex's family
and did so quickly. They didn't want to see posts about their ex. This was
also symbolically a way of indicating the relationship was over. However in some cases
the context of a relationship to a family member meant the connection was maintained,
as noted by Angelina. Here Angelina still followed her ex's siblings but that was because they went
to high school together and so she had known the siblings before she started dating her ex.
Finally friends, which were the most complicated group to handle. Participants often disconnected
from their ex's friends but often waited slightly longer than they might with the ex themselves or
the family members of the ex. This was to avoid reinforcing the breakup or being cruel to the ex.
However in some cases they might refrain from disconnecting either because of the perceived
connection that went beyond the romantic relationship with their ex or because of
the social implications of disconnecting. For example Adeline didn't disconnect from her ex's
best friend because she felt like they had their own sort of relationship that they were friends
and she thought that he's a cool person and she cared about what he was doing in his life.
In our participants experiences around managing data after their breakups we
saw them enacting identity presentation decisions. Some participants were looking
forward to the future and thinking about a post-breakup identity of being single,
while others were thinking more holistically and desired a post-breakup identity that
included the past relationship because it informed who they would be moving forward.
Here we identify two types of data curation -- archivists and revisionists -- that
participants might undertake after a breakup in efforts of creating their
ideal post-break-up identity whether that's future facing or past facing.
For archivists they were concerned about past facing identity,
wanting to honor that the relationship had happened and contributed to who they were now,
so they didn't take a management action on their identity collection. They didn't
delete possessions or remove connections. This meant the data was still available and
that meant that archivists were more likely to encounter moments of unexpected reminiscence.
In contrast revisionists were concerned about future facing identity, how will
my identity be perceived based on how my profile looks now, moving forward.
This meant that revisionists most often took management actions to adjust the
data on their social media sites to adjust their identity exhibitions.
Our work here illustrates the need for design that supports both archivist and revisionist
goals when creating post-break-up identities. We see opportunities for design in places like
the archive feature found on many social media sites. We go into more detail in the paper itself.
We'd like to thank our reviewers and members of the CU IDLab for their feedback, our participants
for sharing their experiences with us and acknowledge the NSF supported this work.
You can find the full paper and blog post at the links on the slide and
I'd be happy to take any questions via the corresponding email found in those links.
Thanks so much.