Digital Possessions After a Romantic Break Up

© 2016 ACM. With technology becoming more pervasive in everyday life, it is common for individuals to use digital media to support the enactment and maintenance of romantic relationships. Partners in a relationship may create digital possessions frequently. However, after a relationship ends, individuals typically seek to disconnect from their ex-partner. This becomes difficult due to the partners' interwoven digital presence and digital possessions. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study exploring individuals' experiences of relationship break up in a digital context, and discuss their attitudes towards digital possessions from those relationships. Five main themes emerged: digital possessions that sustain relationships, comparing before and after, tainted digital possessions, digital possessions and invasions of privacy, involved and emotional reminiscing. Design opportunities were identified in managing attitudes towards digital possessions, disconnecting and reconnecting, and encouraging awareness of digital possessions

Digital Possessions in the Museum of Broken Relationships

This paper describes an interactive demo of our collaborative research activity with the Museum of Broken Relationships, one of Lonely Planet’s’Fifty Museums to Blow Your Mind’. In collaboration with the Museum, we are currently collecting data worldwide and cross-culturally on the digital possessions individuals associate with their romantic break up, combined with the stories behind those possessions. Taking a methodologically innovative approach, we adapt the Museum’s existing practices to conduct research (triangulating existing small-scale interview data) whilst simultaneously generating a new collection for the Museum. In doing so, we foreground contemporary HCI questions of ownership, curation, and presentation of self after a romantic breakup to the public. The demo will exhibit the digital possessions and associated stories that we collect, whilst also giving the CHI community the opportunity to contribute to the collection in real-time at the conference, by sharing digital possessions and stories of their own romantic breakups

International students’ movement to the UK and their digital transition on social media

This study examines the relationship between international students’ movement and their digital transition on Twitter. By using the Twitter API, timelines for 17 Saudi students studying in the UK were retrieved. An in-depth qualitative content analysis for these accounts was conducted for a two year period, before and after their move. The study identified a transition in the students’ timelines on Twitter in terms of what they post. This was usually characterized by an increase in posts related to (1) the UK and international contexts and (2) academic and language topics. The analysis also revealed that social media can play a positive role by providing students with needed information and supporting them to develop their English language. This study successfully identified a form of digital transition on Twitter that students go through and highlighted the positive role of social media in the students’ overall transition experience. This research serves as a good foundation for future researchers interested in the transition and digital technologies or social media

Digital Decoupling and Disentangling:Towards Design for Romantic Break Up

\u3cp\u3eRomantic relationships are often facilitated through digital technologies, such as social networking sites and communication services. They are also facilitated through 'digital possessions', such as messages sent to mobile devices and photos shared through social media. When individuals break up, digitally disconnecting can be facilitated by using those digital technologies and managing or curating these digital possessions. This research explores the break up stories of 13 individuals aged between 18 and 52. The aim of this work is to inform the design of systems focused on supporting individuals to decouple and disentangle digitally in the wake of a break up. Four areas of interest emerged from the data: communication, using digital possessions, managing digital possessions, and experiences of technology. Opportunities for design were identified in decoupling and disentangling, and designing around guilt. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).\u3c/p\u3

Should ChatGPT Write Your Breakup Text? Exploring the Role of AI in Relationship Dissolution

Relationships are essential to our happiness and wellbeing. The dissolution of a relationship, the final stage of relationship's lifecycle and one of the most stressful events in an individual's life, can have profound and long-lasting impacts on people. With the breakup process increasingly facilitated by computer-mediated communication (CMC), and the likely future influence of AI-mediated communication (AIMC) tools, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 21 participants. We aim to understand: 1) the current role of technology in the breakup process, 2) the needs and support individuals have during the process, and 3) how AI might address these needs. Our research shows that people have distinct needs at various stages of ending a relationship. Presently, technology is used for information gathering and community support, acting as a catalyst for breakups, enabling ghosting and blocking, and facilitating communication. Participants anticipate that AI could aid in sense-making of their relationship leading up to the breakup, act as a mediator, assist in crafting appropriate wording, tones, and language during breakup conversations, and support companionship, reflection, recovery, and growth after a breakup. Our findings also demonstrate an overlap between the breakup process and the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of behavior change. Through the lens of TTM, we explore the potential support and affordances AI could offer in breakups, including its benefits and the necessary precautions regarding AI's role in this sensitive process

Understanding everyday experiences of reminiscence for people living with blindness: Practices, tensions and probing new design possibilities

There is growing attention in the HCI community on how technology could be designed to support experiences of reminiscence on past life experiences. Yet, this research has largely overlooked people living with blindness. I present a study that aims to understand everyday experiences of reminiscence for people living with blindness. I conducted a qualitative study with 9 participants living with blindness to understand their personal routines, wishes and desires, and challenges and tensions regarding the experience of reminiscence. Findings are interpreted to discuss new possibilities that offer starting points for future design initiatives and openings for collaboration aimed at creating technology to better support the practices of capturing, sharing, and reflecting on significant memories of the past

Design for Relationship Break Ups:Curation of Digital Possessions

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Individuals in a romantic relationship will typically have a substantial number of digital possessions associated with that relationship; sometimes even creating digital possessions connected to their relationship before meeting in real life. These digital possessions connect partners by contributing to their digital identities as ‘individuals in a relationship’; they are an important part of a digital connection between partners, and actively contribute to the maintenance of that connection. If a romantic relationship ends in a break up, separation, or divorce, the digital possessions that once connected partners in a positive way become responsible for maintaining a connection that no longer accurately reflects the ex-partners’ relationship status. The persistence of digital possessions means that until they are managed or curated in some way, those digital possessions will continue to connect ex-partners in a digital context. The tools and options available to ex-partners when it comes to managing and curating their digital possessions in the context of a relationship break up are limited, and often do not support the specific intent of the individual. In this doctoral thesis, I investigated the ways in which technology could support individuals in managing and curating their digital possessions associated with a past relationship, after that relationship has ended. Through four qualitative studies, this research (1) introduced and evaluated eight prototype grammars of action aimed at supporting individuals to manage and curate their digital possessions in the context of a break up; (2) presented a reproducible method for identifying design dimensions to guide the development of those grammars of action across different life transitions; (3) demonstrated an understanding of the ways in which individuals’ attitudes towards digital possessions may be ‘tainted’ after a break up; and (4) demonstrated the current technical limitations individuals are confronted with when curating and managing digital possessions post-break up

A quantified past : fieldwork and design for remembering a data-driven life

PhD ThesisA ‘data-driven life’ has become an established feature of present and future technological visions. Smart homes, smart cities, an Internet of Things, and particularly the Quantified Self movement are all premised on the pervasive datafication of many aspects of everyday life. This thesis interrogates the human experience of such a data-driven life, by conceptualising, investigating, and speculating about these personal informatics tools as new technologies of memory. With respect to existing discourses in Human-Computer Interaction, Memory Studies and Critical Data Studies, I argue that the prevalence of quantified data and metrics is creating fundamentally new and distinct records of everyday life: a quantified past. To address this, I first conduct qualitative, and idiographic fieldwork – with long-term self-trackers, and subsequently with users of ‘smart journals’ – to investigate how this data-driven record mediates the experience of remembering. Further, I undertake a speculative and design-led inquiry to explore context of a ’quantified wedding’. Adopting a context where remembering is centrally valued, this Research through Design project demonstrates opportunities and develops considerations for the design of data-driven tools for remembering. Crucially, while speculative, this project maintains a central focus on individual experience, and introduces an innovative methodological approach ‘Speculative Enactments’ for engaging participants meaningfully in speculative inquiry. The outcomes of this conceptual, empirical and speculative inquiry are multiple. I present, and interpret, a variety of rich descriptions of existing and anticipated practices of remembering with data. Introducing six experiential qualities of data, and reflecting on how data requires selectivity and construction to meaningfully account for one’s life, I argue for the design of ‘Documentary Informatics’. This perspective fundamentally reimagines the roles and possibilities for personal informatics tools; it looks beyond the current present-focused and goal-oriented paradigm of a data-driven life, to propose a more poetic orientation to recording one’s life with quantified data

You got yourself a whole new life, and all I've got is half this old one: Breaking up and moving on in the social media age

Going through a break-up can be difficult. Break-ups are emotionally fraught; two people have to untangle their lives from each other. Research has paid attention to the implications of a break-up on the involved parties&rsquo; mental and emotional well-being and identified best practices for healing and growing from a break-up. However, these findings and practices are not well suited to social media because of how data represent our lives. As a result, what social media users are left with in the wake of a break-up are features designed to encourage connection and reminiscence when those things may not be appropriate or desired. In other words, people know how to break-up offline; however, they &ndash; and by extension, social media algorithms that recommend or remind &ndash; cannot accurately represent the experience of breaking up. In turn, the lack of understanding of how to &ldquo;break-up&rdquo; online leaves people having bad experiences with no remedy for preventing them after experiencing a break-up.In this dissertation, I explore how people managed their data in the wake of a break-up to create new, post-break-up identities. My dissertation work spans three studies. In the first study, I explore people&rsquo;s upsetting encounters with algorithmically curated content about their break-up. These encounters occur partly because of data remnants that remain after a break-up &ndash; the pictures, posts, and connections that persist past the end of the relationship.In the second study, I investigate how people make decisions about their data and enact them through data management features. As part of these data management practices, people create post-break-up identities as they decide what to do (or not to do) with the data remnants from their relationship. These identities are akin to exhibitions, with people exhibiting different curatorial philosophies toward their data remnants.In the third study of my dissertation, I interview couples who have not broken up yet to explore what data management practices they might use depending on how their relationships end. From these interviews, I identify design implications that could assist people in better managing their identities after a break-up and limit the impact of insensitive algorithmic curation.My dissertation makes theoretical, empirical, and design contributions. Theoretically, my dissertation extends Hogan&rsquo;s (2010) identity exhibition to account for the human as a curator of online identity. Empirically, my dissertation contributes to our understanding of break-ups and their representations in sociotechnical systems, which sit in conversation with HCI work around life transitions. Finally, my dissertation identifies design implications to better support individuals going through break-ups, implications that could support other life transitions as well.</p