 | |
| The Breakup Post-it Note says "I'm sorry. I can't. Don't hate me." |
The main character in Sex and the City, Carrie, gets broken up with via a post-it note left on her computer. The YouTube clip I posted is of her and her friends talking about it. (They are talking about talk...metalanguage.) Carrie even brings along the post-it to show her friends. These four women are shocked that the medium of a post-it note seemed to be an acceptable form of communicating a breakup. Other "bad forms" of breaking up to them also included the phone and a doorman. The four women obviously value face-to-face breakups more. The media ideologies of these four women don't match up with the media ideologies of the man who broke up with Carrie. This also might hearken at some gender social norms of what ways of breaking up women find to be acceptable versus what men deem to be acceptable.
Gershon brings up the topic of remediation in this chapter. Carrie negotiates the breakup from post-it to a conversation with the girls to contemplating an angry phone message- all different media forms and ways of speaking. These different forms of media are cathartic to Carrie in dealing with the breakup, and the phone message seems like a form of closure.
I think that this is not only a great example of how technology has influenced our lives, but is also a great example of the concept of remediation that Samantha discussed. In the video, one of the girls says "I remember when breaking up on the phone was in bad taste". The interesting connection between technology and remediation, is that as more and more forms of technology are introduced into mainstream media the more the concept of remediation occurs. The newer the form of technology, the more the etiquette of older forms of media are up for debate.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the previous comment that this clip is an excellent example of a number of concepts highlighted by Gershon. In particular, I like that Samantha highlighted the gendered social norms involved in breakups. Obviously the women were felt that the method Burger chose to end the relationship was unacceptable. However, later in the episode Carrie encounters a male friend of Burger's and after hearing about the situation he shruggs his shoulders and says "well, there is no 'good' way to breakup"; condoning Burger's actions. This situation clearly exemplifies the dichotomous (emotional vs. unemotional) gender norms associated with women and men in our society.
ReplyDeleteI found a great clip regarding facebook and breaking up. Initially I thought it was just another video about a guy explaining his facbeook breakup via a YouTube video, but as I began to watch it even more, the man in the clip is using YouTube as his medium for actually "breaking up" with facebook. Another aspect of Gershon's book integrated into this clip is the idea of a public. His grounds for "breaking up with facebook" are centered around his dislike for how large its gotten and how many different publics he has to simultaneously monitor on his page. For example, he blamed facebook for "showing my mom drunk pictures of me on the beach on spring break." I thought it was a good integration of many important topics we've covered: publics and the use of media for breaking up. Funny stuff! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSBIAW5GSps
ReplyDelete