by Lesley Ciarula TaylorIt’s way more than "complicated".
A University of Western Ontario masters’ thesis has found a full 88 per cent of people after a breakup stalk their exes on Facebook.
Jilted lovers signed on to friends’ account to spy on the one who dumped them. They deleted pictures of those happier times. They pored over old messages or wall posts. They clicked agonized fingers on the guy or girl who replaced them.
“It’s so interesting right now, so different from before this technology existed. Once you broke up in the past, it was over,” media studies graduate student Veronika Lukacs told the Star after successfully defending her thesis.
Not entirely. “Stalking isn’t really new. It used to involve parking your car outside their house,” her mother told the 25-year-old.
Still, this groundbreaking analysis of Facebook and broken hearts does have serious implications, Lukacs said.
“Nearly everyone is participating in these behaviours, it’s very very common,” she said.
“At the end of the day, Facebook does present very serious challenges for people getting over a breakup. It’s a much more serious issue than a lot of people think.”
Surveillance of someone on Facebook, or “creeping,” didn’t follow the patterns Lukacs expected.
“I had expected people who were not Facebook friends with their ex-partners would be less distressed.
“We found the opposite was true. People who had unfriended their partners had higher levels of distress. Based on interviewing people, I’m thinking that people who are the most distressed are the ones who delete their partners.”
Less surprisingly, the dumped partners who were most upset were also the most avid stalkers and the dumpers were the least upset.
Lukacs surveyed 107 people over age 18 who had experienced a breakup in the previous 12 months. Three-quarters of them were Western students. She interviewed 10 of them.
“A lot of people who I had interviewed talked about their surveillance behaviour and how they knew it wasn’t good for them and yet somehow they were doing it anyway. Rationality didn’t play a role for them.”
One man confessed he had hacked into his ex-girlfriend’s Facebook account. “He never thought he was the kind of person who would do that. He was really embarrassed.”
Among Lukacs’s findings:
• 86.2 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that Facebook is part of their daily routine.
• 70 per cent would use a friend’s account to keep track of a former girl or boyfriend secretly after deleting them on Facebook.
• 65.5 per cent updated their profiles once a month or more. Their number of friends ranged from 69 to 1,800 with 484 as the mean.
• 64 per cent reread or overanalyzed old messages or wall posts from their ex.
• 61 per cent were asked about the breakup when their relationship status changed.
• 50 per cent deleted an ex-partners pictures.
• 38 per cent altered their privacy controls on their Facebook accounts.
• 33 per cent changed their Facebook status to quote a song or lyric about the ex-partner.
• 31 per cent posted a picture in an attempt to make the ex jealous.
• 5.6 per cent posted a slanderous comment.
Lukacs is hoping to explore more aspects of Facebook and relationships with her thesis adviser, Anabel Quan-Haase, but will move her studies in the fall to occupational therapy from media studies.
“I’m interested in well-being. I was always interested in more of the social science side of media studies.”
