Of course this probably wasn’t what bothered Olivier the most about the whole process. He was getting a divorce because his wife had sent him an e-mail out of the blue asking for a divorce and offering no reasons while he was away on a business trip. It turned out to be a nonnegotiable decision. After the two-line e-mail announcing that she wanted a divorce, she would communicate with him only by e-mail and occasional angry phone calls. She closed their joint bank accounts while he was gone, so he returned to no money and no place to stay. For weeks he had no explanation that made sense of why she wanted a divorce, although gradually he learned of another man, someone she had met at work. All the communication he had with her gave him no clear insights into why she was doing what she was doing. Knowing another man existed did not seem to explain enough for him.

She was violating all the shared order that they carefully, or even perhaps accidentally, created together—when they spoke in French or English together, when they sent e-mails to their friends from their joint e-mail account, or when they would e-mail someone from their individual personal accounts. The more Olivier detailed how divorce was affecting how he and his wife/ex-wife were using media to communicate, the more apparent it became that the couple had developed together a system for indicating that some messages were formal, some informal, some professional, and some intimate. They used e-mail accounts, phones, and different languages all to create intertwined ways of adding information to the message—a message from their joint e-mail account would signal something different than if that same message had been sent from their individual e-mail accounts. In e-mailing his work account, his wife/ex-wife was rejecting all the years of chosen habits that they had created together just through how they e-mailed. So the unseemly disorder that Olivier experienced with these e-mails to his work account—these weekly, sometimes daily, reminders of how her decisions at every level had transformed his life’s plans into unwelcome chaos—captured the misery of this dissolution. Since the moment she e-mailed him to demand a divorce, Olivier explained that he felt none of his wishes were respected; sending messages only to his work e-mail was a small example that seemed to reverberate and point to all the others, beginning with the e-mail requesting a divorce.

Olivier had been using the possibilities made available by e-mail—multiple accounts—to sort his communication. His wife/ex-wife was refusing to accede to this system of classifying communication. In short, she was sending information through her choice of medium (e-mail and work account) as much as by the content of her messages. This double communication in the message is possible only because of Olivier’s, or anyone’s, media ideologies. As mentioned in the introduction, people’s media ideologies—their beliefs about how a medium communicates and structures communication—makes a personal e-mail account different from a work e-mail account, or a text message different from a phone call. The difference often lies not in the actual message, but in people’s understandings of the media. Media ideologies are responsible for the ways in which second-order information works (see chapter 4). Second-order information refers to the information that can guide you into understanding how particular words and statements should be interpreted.¹ One never sends a message without the message being accompanied by second-order information; that is, without indications about how the sender would like the message received.

Media contain second-order information because of people’s media ideologies, people’s understandings of how e-mail, phone, instant messaging (IM), and other media add important information to the message. Let me give you a concrete example of when someone’s media ideology got in the way of interpreting the seriousness of a text message. This is a story that Halle, an undergraduate, told me toward the end of an interview, when she suddenly remembered another story about texting. Halle and Doug had been a couple for a number of weeks. They met in a class where they both also became friends with Rianna. Rianna always struck Halle as a little bit off—she was one of those people who always seemed to say something slightly unexpected and awkward, something that made the other people in the conversation stop and scratch their heads about how to continue the conversation. As Halle and Doug started getting together, they started joking about Rianna’s social gracelessness—most of this by text message. After a while, Halle began teasing Doug by text that he was secretly infatuated with Rianna. This text joking carried on for a few weeks. Then Doug texted Halle, telling her he had to break up with her because he really was in love with Rianna. This was by text, a medium that Halle had always used for joking. Texting was never a medium that Halle used to convey serious information such as “I am breaking up with you.” So she couldn’t understand the message at first. On the one hand, it was a complete surprise: There was no immediately prior conversation the message could be referring to. On the other hand, the only conversation they had ever had by text about Rianna was one that joked about desire. She responded as though Doug was still joking. He texted her back that he wasn’t, that he was completely serious. Halle narrates:

How Halle understands texting as a medium shapes the ways in which she responds to Doug’s message. The texting was supposed to give second-order disclaimers to the message—carried along with the message was this imaginary additional frame urging the receiver to understand that nothing said in this medium is serious because texting is not a serious medium. Halle feels that Doug violates this tacit assumption—he says serious things in a medium that she considers appropriate only for the most casual and joking of conversations. Let’s not forget that Doug tells Halle that he wants to break up with her for Rianna, a woman she doesn’t respect and finds off-putting. This too is part of the story. But it is Halle’s media ideology that in her own account affects how she decides to treat Doug afterward. She decides not to keep communicating with someone who texts this kind of information, and thus in her mind behaves badly. When Doug tried to get back together repeatedly (by texting, not through face-to-face communication), she turned him down. I am not saying Halle was wrong or right. Instead, I am pointing to how important media ideologies can be in shaping how people actually interpret the messages they receive. Content isn’t everything; media ideologies matter.

Sometimes when people talk about ideologies, they talk about beliefs that mystify, that keep someone from understanding how things truly are. The term ideology does not have that connotation for me. Media ideologies are not true or false. An e-mail conversation is not, in its essence, more formal than an instant-message conversation—or less honest or spontaneous, or more calculated. But some people believe that e-mail is more formal, more dishonest, and more calculated, and this affects the ways they send and interpret e-mail messages. Understanding people’s media ideologies can give insights into how utterances are received, and why people choose to reply in particular ways. But studying media ideologies will not give insights into what is really being communicated as opposed to what people believe is being communicated. It is not an analytical tool for discerning truth or reality; instead, it is but one analytical tool for understanding the ways in which all communication is socially constructed and socially interpreted. Understanding media ideologies is central to understanding how communication happens, especially now when there are so many possible media from which to choose.

Why do people talk about the medium of a breakup? In my interviews, I learned about people’s media ideologies from their emotionally charged stories about endings. I was finding out about how they thought the media that were used affected the communication when the conversations were all about love or desire and its loss. People were talking about appropriateness all the time, about why one medium might be appropriate or inappropriate for ending a relationship. Sometimes I talked to people about how certain technologies had contributed to ending relationships; for example, how sharing passwords had, in retrospect, become the first step in destroying a relationship. I talked to college students about ending friendships as well, about the differences between ending romantic relationships and ending friendships. What I now know about people’s media ideologies is intimately linked to what they said about different media as a means for communicating about ending relationships.

Talking about how people choose to end a relationship may be a common American way to talk about breakups. When I was discussing this project with another anthropologist, Ray McDermott, in a tea shop in Palo Alto, he recalled when he and his students had interviewed Americans about being in a family in the early 1980s. He said that when people talked about divorce, many focused on how things were said, what words were used. At the time, there weren’t so many media to choose from—people would talk in person, call on a landline or write a letter. Ray said that people tended to describe their sense of outrage, injustice, and grievance in terms of how someone had ended the relationship, not that the relationship was ending. The resentment that people were willing to voice about ending relationships all revolved around the form of the ending. When they would narrate how the relationship ended, they would focus on what was said. In my interviews, this held true as well. Turning to the media used is just an extension of a U.S. tendency to discuss breakups by describing the way breakups took place.

When people focus on the “how” of a breakup, particular aspects of a medium become important—whether it is too formal or too informal, whether it allows for intonation, conversational turn-taking, circulation of the breakup text, explanation, and so on. In my interviews, some media were generally acknowledged to be deficient in one way or another. When people explained to me the problems with texting, as I mentioned in the introduction, they often focused on how brief text messages had to be. Breakups should ideally be adequately explained, and how much can one actually say in 160 characters? In addition, some people insisted, text messages were for deciding only the most casual of arrangements such as when one should meet for dinner or who else might want to go to the movies. For these people, text messaging is too informal for something as serious or important as a breakup.

The formality or informality of a medium depends on people’s media ideologies; there is nothing inherent in a medium to make it more formal or informal than any other medium. The kind of informality people agree to attribute to a particular medium, such as texting, will shape when it is appropriate to use that medium. While text messages might be too informal for a breakup, they often had the right level of informality for starting to flirt with someone. Women insisted to me that if they met someone who was interested in them, they would exchange phone numbers, but only to text each other. Calling would express too much interest; calling would be too forward a move. But texting was considered to carry low enough stakes that one could begin an exchange with the right level of ambiguity, unclear whether the exchange is about friendship or desire. As Summer suggested in her interview, discussing the text message she saved that a cute man had sent her a half hour after their first conversation: “The good thing about texting is that it’s that nice in-between between calling and not doing anything. It’s not so desperate.”

It is this very casualness that makes texting a problematic medium for breaking up. One connects to someone initially using texting because people presume that texting reveals so little about the depth or seriousness of one’s emotions. As a result, it is hardly appropriate as a medium for breaking up. What is caution in one’s choice of media in the initial contact becomes cowardice at the end.

Texting’s brevity and informality also affects the ways texting is actually used in a breakup. Here I want to distinguish between media ideology and practice. When people told me about their media ideologies of texting, they would stress how inappropriate texting was as a medium for breaking up.² Sometimes, however, when they talked about how text messages actually played a role in their breakups, I got a different sense of how text messages functioned. People would tell me about choosing to start text-message fights on purpose, ones that sometimes, but not always, led to breakups. People would prefer text-message fights because, as Rose explained to me, the recipient would focus his or her entire attention on what you were saying by text and would have to respond to that message. Rose compared this with face-to-face fights:

Because of this, some people used text messages to begin the breakup ritual. Texting “I want to breakup” in some cases was only the mediated version of the face-to-face utterance: “We have to talk.” The possibility of a breakup is promised but not definite. Instead, texting a wish to breakup in the early evening sometimes ensured frantic phone calls or long face-to-face conversations until six in the morning. A text message’s very informality, however, meant uttering the desire to breakup by text might not be taken seriously as a desire. M...