Why Facebook should make it easier for you to break up

You know what it is like. You change your status from in a relationship to ‘it’s complicated’ but deep down you know it is all over. But there on your page is all the evidence of the three years you spent together before things went awry.

Well even academics think that social networking sites should enable couples who split up to erase the evidence of their relationship more easily.

Dr Corina Sas from Lancaster University and Professor Steve Whittaker of the University of California at Santa Cruz conducted interviews with 24 young people about how they handled the evidence of their broken relationship in the online world, and concluded that removing the traces of a past relationship is rather tricky. Their thoughts are included in a research document Design for forgetting; disposing of digital possessions after a breakup

The pair said…

“The greatest problems involved content on Facebook where couples could easily be reminded of their ex unless they deliberately unfriended them. Even then, there could be content about your ex on your friends’ pages which you can’t delete.”

So they suggest that the social networking site should offer a feature which makes it easier to delete a couple’s joint content following a break up. Doing it manually can to be too time consuming and in some instances way too painful.

Dr Sas said: “It can be very time consuming when digital content is spread across different devices like laptops or tablets and this would make the task much simpler. It could also enable people to deal with the break up more effectively.

“The best approach is not to act on impulse but instead try to wait. Then you can select which memories you want to keep and which you are confident you will not regret deleting.”

There’s more here.