US college students seem to take up new communicative technologies and social media effortlessly. Yet many report they are regularly nervous as to how to interpret their peers' behavior and how to employ these technologies and media within a larger interactive repertoire. For these students, no event seems to strain consensus more than the end of a relationship, when they scrutinize the means of communication just as much as the content. This book explores the challenges of incorporating new technologies and media—particularly email, text messaging, and Facebook—into romantic and personal lives, as reported by students at Indiana University. Gershon draws on interviews, screenshots, and feedback from her own classroom teaching to study students' interpretations of new media in their daily lives.
The book consists of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction and Ch. 1 explain how the author's interest in the subject unfolded from discussions with her students about rapidly shifting interactive worlds. She then lays out in clear terms the sources for her research and key concepts for the book. Gershon points out that the context of breakups through new media reminds us how communicative acts are always about more than their propositional content, with the medium contributing significant second-order information about the message. While there are patterns to communicative knowledge that we might characterize as media ideologies, understandings of the rules are never completely shared, subject to idioms of practice. Thus, Gershon's subjects dispute the formality, informality, and contextual appropriateness of text messaging, phone conversations, face-to-face communication, instant messaging, and Facebook's various tools.
Ch. 2 profiles the media of email and Facebook to outline how message structure—including embedding and time lapse—influences how people know one another in a romantic relationship. The author discusses contested standards of publicity as well as challenges that students report on reading sincerity and intentionality. Ch. 3 builds on an insight from Ch. 2 that the uses and effects of new technologies are always evaluated in terms of interactive “traditions” from previous media. Borrowing from authors Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Gershon asserts that such remediation is fundamental to contemporary breakups.
Ch. 4 shows how the situational selection of one particular medium out of a larger available repertoire is read as a clue to messages' intent, and therefore their meaning. Often the choice of a medium offers an incomplete answer, leading interlocutors to dig for clues within each others' Facebook profiles and through constructing fake profiles, activities subject to accusations of “snooping,” or other labels for ethical misconduct. Ch. 5 explores shifting notions of “public” information and related definitions of intimacy. The conclusion reminds us that the introduction of earlier technologies, such as the telephone, generated social unease and nostalgia in equal measure. Standardization of protocol for today's new media will likely take some time. Overall, this book offers a thoughtful, accessible, and concise set of insights into how new media are influencing the interactive basis of student romance, friendship, and private life today.
