Social Media Makes Forgetting Unfortunate Breakups Hard To Do

A new study finds that the task of forgetting unfortunate painful breakups has become even more difficult after the invention of the social media.

With the advent of the social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it's not uncommon to flaunt relationships over social networking sites with photos, status updates, songs and video dedications, etc. This is termed as "digital possession" by Steve Whittaker, a psychology professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, and Corina Sas of Lancaster University, who conducted a study into the effects of social media in forgetting unfortunate incidents like a painful relationship breakup. They found that social media makes it even more difficult to get over a difficult romantic breakup because of the vast collection of digital possessions people now have.

The study was conducted by interviewing 24 young people. Through the interview Whittaker and Sas found that these digital possessions act as constant reminders of a person's prior relationship and can be upsetting, making the act of forgetting even more difficult.

Some people want to forget but are "extremely resistant to actual deletion," while others regret deleting these digital possessions. Photo tagging is another issue that makes such incidents unforgettable. For example, after a break-up, a person may de-tag himself or herself from a picture someone else has uploaded but that doesn't stop them from revisiting the photo since it's actually not deleted completely.

"A lack of disposal tools meant most participants either kept, or disposed of everything," the authors said. "Keepers took longer to heal, disposers often regretted their impulsiveness."

The study found that 12 of the study subjects deleted the digital reminders, eight were keepers and four were selective about what they kept or deleted.

Whittaker and Sas suggest that the social media should invent something like a "Pandora's Box," which automatically dumps or hides all digital possessions related to a person after a break-up.

The paper "Design for Forgetting: Disposing of Digital Possessions after a Breakup" was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris last week.