The days when a romantic breakup meant ripped-up photos and burned love letters are long gone. Today, even if you delete the digital photos and emails, the proliferation of social media, with the digital records of ex on Facebook, tumblr, and flicker, has made forgetting a bigger chore. Says Steve Whittaker, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz who specialises in human-computer interaction, “People are keeping huge collections of digital possessions. There has been little exploration of the negative role of digital possessions when people want to forget aspects of their lives.” In the research paper, ‘Design for Forgetting: Disposing of Digital Possessions after a Breakup’, Whittaker and co-author Corina Sas, of Lancaster University, examine the challenges of digital possessions and their disposal after a romantic breakup.
Our digital possessions include photos, messages, music, and videos stored across several devices like computers, tablets, phones, and cameras on different applications, web-services, and platforms. The researchers say that their pervasiveness “creates problems during a breakup, as people ‘inhabit’ their digital space where photos and music constantly remind them about their prior relationship.” In interviews with young people between the ages of 19 and 34, they found that digital possessions after a breakup are often evocative and upsetting, leading to distinct disposal strategies: Some are deleters; some are keepers, and some others are selective disposers. Some of the initial tactics include changing one’s relationship status to ‘single’, immediately unfriending or blocking the ex’s access to your profile. However, there are times, like when on Facebook, where photos can be untagged but not deleted if posted by someone else. It’s time consuming and emotionally taxing because people tend to re-engage with possessions, especially photos.
The researchers also attempt to offer solutions to this problem. They propose that software solutions might help scrub cyberspace of painful memories, for instance automatic ‘harvesting’ using facial recognition, machine learning or entity extraction. Or a holding pattern until a cooler head prevails, for a lack of disposal tools meant most participants either kept, or disposed of everything. They say, “Keepers took longer to heal, disposers often regretted their impulsiveness,” suggesting a ‘Pandora’s Box’ as a solution to this. This ‘box’ could automatically scoop up all the digital artifacts of a relationship, put them in a single place for later strategic deleting or retention. Or a trusted friend could be put in the position as a gatekeeper. There could even be new tools for active selection from collections of digital possessions to create a ‘treasure chest’ of valuable items that may be retained for later happy memories.
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