Study: Social Media Making Forgetting Romantic Breakups Difficult

Even though digital photos and emails can be deleted in no time, the proliferation of social media has made getting over a romantic breakup a bigger chore than in the bygone era.

According to a study, ubiquitous digital records of a once beloved keep lurking on Facebook, tumblr, and flicker, makes it difficult to forget painful memories.

Excessive Usage of Social Media may Harm Marriage
Increased use of social media to communicate with your partner may damage your relationship, especially if you are married.

Steve Whittaker, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in human-computer interaction, said people are keeping huge collections of digital possessions, and there has been little exploration of the negative role of digital possessions when people want to forget aspects of their lives.

In a 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. Sas worked on the research as a visiting professor at UCSC.

Digital possessions include photos, messages, music, and video stored across multiple devices such as computers, tablets, phones, and cameras. Their pervasiveness creates problems during a breakup, as people 'inhabit' their digital space where photos and music constantly remind them about their prior relationship, the study states.

Social Media can Offer Valuable Additional Support to Older People
New research from the University of Luxembourg has shown that the use of social media by older people can offer valuable additional support in cases of sickness and diseases.

In interviews with 24 young people between the ages of 19 and 34, Whittaker and Sas found that digital possessions after a breakup are often evocative and upsetting, leading to distinct disposal strategies. Twelve of the subjects were deleters; eight were keepers, and four others were selective disposers.

Disposal is made more difficult today because digital possessions are in vast collections spread across multiple devices, applications, web-services, and platforms, the study further states.

Using Social Media During Office Hours may Become a Form of Corruption in Malaysia
The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has criticized the habit of government workers accessing social media websites such as Facebook during office hours.

Whittaker and Sas propose that software solutions might help scrub cyberspace of painful memories, for instance automatic "harvesting" using facial recognition, machine learning or entity extraction.

Source-ANI

Majority of People Who Quit Social Media Get Back Online Within a Day
Researchers believe that majority of the people who leave social media world often get back online within 24 hours.