the stories Gershon heard were much more sophisticated than simply "he texted me" or "she sent me an e-mail." People she spoke to did a lot of "media switching" and made use of many forms of new media in order to look for reasons behind the breakup and even continue to follow former lovers' lives online. She said there are various things that can be learned from each form of communication.
For example, a 30-something man she interviewed learned that his wife wanted a divorce through a two-sentence e-mail while he was away on a business trip. In the meantime, she had emptied their joint bank accounts and he had no place to stay upon his return. Afterwards, she kept e-mailing his work account rather than having direct conversation. She ignored all of his notes he sent to her personal e-mail account.
"He began to pay a lot of attention to the e-mail account the messages were coming from," Gershon recalled. "He began to try and figure out what was going on. He learned that she had been experimenting with trying to have different personalities online. She had practiced being a different person on her Facebook profile," she added. "He also figured out through the technology, in part, that this other person (with whom she was having an affair) was at her workplace."
The boundaries were clear: He was no longer allowed to contact her personal account or interact with her during her personal time.
"People really are using all the ways in which these technologies give them access to different kinds of information about what's going on, to try and figure out what's going on," Gershon said. "What I find really interesting about the break-up stories is that they were really detective stories."
via eurekalert.org