在09年的电影《你其实不懂他的心》中，现代的分手时尚得到了充分诠释。剧中，女演员德鲁·巴里摩尔说：“我上班时收到他的语音留言，所以回到家后给他回电话。接着他发邮件到我的黑莓，我就给他发了短信。如今，我不得不检查所有可能的通讯渠道，到头来只发现被七种高科技拒绝了七次。真是累死我了。”

In a more contemporary depiction of break-up fashion, US actress Drew Barrymore says in the 2009 film He's Just Not That Into You: "I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work, so I called him at home, and then he e-mailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies…It's exhausting."

《新闻周刊》援引了美国印第安纳大学传播与文化学院助理教授伊兰娜·格尔森的作品，后者曾问自己的学生“怎样分手比较糟糕”。从学生们的反馈来看，相比分手时收到的信息，那些媒介更让他们愤怒。他们埋怨对方通过短信、Facebook等社交网站而非本人当面提分手。

Newsweek cited the work of Ilana Gershon, an assistant professor of communication and culture at Indiana University in the US, who once asked her students what makes a bad breakup. According to Gershon, her students all responded with tales of outrage about the medium rather than the message, complaining that they got the bad news by text or by social networking sites like Facebook, rather than in person.

受该调查启发，格尔森教授决定深入研究这些新技术是如何改变爱情规则的。在她的新书《分手2.0:通过新媒体切断联系》中，格尔森写道，受访的所有人几乎都认为当面分手是最体面的分手方式，但由于这种面对面的分手不能让他们达到目的，很多人都转而借助新媒体。

Inspired by this finding, Gershon decided to study how new technology has changed the rules of romance. In her new book, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media, Gershon wrote that almost all the people she talked to agreed that the most honorable way to break up was in person, but many turned to new media because the face-to-face conversations didn't get the results they wanted.