Is It Still Considered PDA If The Affection Is Shown On Facebook?
from the poke-this dept
From giving a girlfriend your letter jacket to public displays of affection, some relationship rituals are meant for more than just the two people involved -- they exist to let everyone know that you are both, indeed, taken. It's no surprise that these acts have found online equivalents. For relationships in the online generation, Facebook has become the de facto place to announce one's relationship status to the world. Sure, MySpace and Friendster had relationship statuses, but any changes to your relationship status remained in relative obscurity unless someone was actively monitoring it every day. Short-lived SingleStat.us was created to help to solve just that problem for pining MySpace Romeos. On Facebook, however, change your status to "In A Relationship" and a little heart appears in your personal news feed, which then immediately spreads the good news to all of your Facebook friends. Having trouble finding time to have that "Relationship Defining Talk?" Just change your status with the object of your affection, and if they consent, then, Voila! No messy "talking" needed. But beware, breakups also happen in this brave new world. Whereas before the Internet, a public breakup may have involved a heated yelling match at a local diner, today, breaking up over Facebook draw the collective ire of thousands.![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
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Interesting
But we had the talk about it a month before I actually changed my Facebook status.
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boring
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It gets worse
But Facebook PDAs go deeper. How about... sexually explicit wall-to-wall conversations... or worse, sexually charged conversation between a couple on someone else's photo comment thread... Then, people get notifications of these new comments... and... yeah, I've seen it happen. lol. Awkward. There are private messages for a reason!
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One of the problems is that it's not granular enough. When someone is listed as 'in a relationship' and they remove that from their public profile - without replacing it with another status - it can mean a few things. It happened to a friend of mine earlier this year, who was in a long-distance engagement; his fiancee came to visit him, and a few days later, he removed his status from his profile. It could have been a desire for privacy or - as in this case - that they had broken up, but he didn't want to declare himself single.
The other slightly-related thing I can mention is people who don't connect the 'interested in' field with the 'looking for' one - and thus accidentally announce a random and incorrect sexual orientation...
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Meaningless Reference
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PDA?
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Wow.
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