The Future is Friendly?
By Wendy Shalit
July 18, 2008
A TELUS mobile poster recently caught my eye. It was a simple subway ad asking the question, "How do you break up?" Here were my options, according to Telus: "Text, email, call, messenger?" Then at the bottom, without any trace of irony: "Telus. The future is friendly."
Apparently, not friendly enough. Call me old-fashioned, but what happened to breaking up in person? I mean, it's great that Facebook gives me an update whenever "So-and-so is no longer in a relationship with so-and-so," but this always makes me worry that this is the same way so-and-so found out she'd been dumped in the first place.
Lately, I've gotten a slew of Facebook messages connected to breakups-by-text, and so I'm wondering: How do people handle this, emotionally? When someone "unfriends" you on Facebook, there is no real way to retaliate; there's no option to "Mark As, I Didn't Want to be His Friend Anyway'" or "Mark As Enemy." And that's annoying enough, but take a relationship with intimate feelings and potentially intimate body parts involved, and I would imagine that the feelings of rejection are multiplied a thousandfold if someone merely texts you "buh-bye!"
What do you think? Is this really appropriate and I'm missing something? I can see how someone might delude himself into thinking that he's tech-savvy because he's breaking up via a text message. But maybe he--or she-- is just emotionally repressed.
Here's a spoofed version of the Telus ad:
By Wendy Shalit
July 18, 2008
A TELUS mobile poster recently caught my eye. It was a simple subway ad asking the question, "How do you break up?" Here were my options, according to Telus: "Text, email, call, messenger?" Then at the bottom, without any trace of irony: "Telus. The future is friendly."
Apparently, not friendly enough. Call me old-fashioned, but what happened to breaking up in person? I mean, it's great that Facebook gives me an update whenever "So-and-so is no longer in a relationship with so-and-so," but this always makes me worry that this is the same way so-and-so found out she'd been dumped in the first place.
Lately, I've gotten a slew of Facebook messages connected to breakups-by-text, and so I'm wondering: How do people handle this, emotionally? When someone "unfriends" you on Facebook, there is no real way to retaliate; there's no option to "Mark As, I Didn't Want to be His Friend Anyway'" or "Mark As Enemy." And that's annoying enough, but take a relationship with intimate feelings and potentially intimate body parts involved, and I would imagine that the feelings of rejection are multiplied a thousandfold if someone merely texts you "buh-bye!"
What do you think? Is this really appropriate and I'm missing something? I can see how someone might delude himself into thinking that he's tech-savvy because he's breaking up via a text message. But maybe he--or she-- is just emotionally repressed.
Here's a spoofed version of the Telus ad:
Makes a point, doesn't it?
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