Tech | February 08, 2010 | 0 comments

Digital Tears: Breakups And Social Networks by Shereen Meraji

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Technology has changed the way we date and the way we break up.

Gigi Quintana is a veteran of breaking hearts in the age of social networking. She recently parted ways with a girlfriend after dating for several months, and admits that putting an end to their online connection was just as difficult as the breakup itself.

Her Facebook status said "in a relationship," so she deleted it. But she didn't stop there.

"I blocked her sister, I blocked everyone that knew her," Quintana says while on a smoke break from her coffee-shop job at Tryst in Washington, D.C. "And she is still friends with my friends, so I had to go to the extent of blocking her."

The cafe where Quintana works is full of people surfing the Web, and quite a few had an opinion about what it's like to break up when you're virtually tied to your ex by Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Delicious, MySpace, Flickr, Foursquare and Facebook.

Paul Monday, a blogger and avid social networker, says that if you stay socially networked to an ex, it's "basically like stabbing yourself in the heart again every four hours or something."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123501060
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