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Intimacy 137You don’t have to ask your friends or her friends if she’s seeing someone new. Likeyou know. And then they want you to know. (Sims, Rural and Urban Youth)Teens are aware that their exes see them in these networked publics anduse the opportunity to communicate with them, though not directly. Ono,a Haitian American sixteen-year-old from Brooklyn, New York, used theopportunity provided by social network sites to communicate her angertoward her ex-boyfriend.You want to make them feel so bad that the relationship ended. So you take out allthe comments, unless, it depends, unless you are still friends with that person. Takeout all the pictures. Put some other person, or maybe delete him from your Friendslist, and, but you know that he’s gonna look at your profile anyway, so you putother males next to you, or put pictures of another male and say how nice he looksin that outfit or whatever, or my future man, or whatever, so you could put as muchanger in that person as you can, or if you guys have the same Friend, like if me andmy boyfriend have you as a Friend, I’ll use you to get his attention. (Sims, Ruraland Urban Youth)Ono strategized about how to use her shared public to make her exboyfriendfeel bad by signaling that she had severed ties with him, that hewas no longer her Friend, and that she was intimately connected to otherboys. The same technology used to publicly affirm intimate relationshipscan be used to publicly demonstrate their demise and to communicateanger toward someone with whom a teen may no longer have directcontact.Bob used the same technology to communicate to an ex-girlfriend agentler message. He had just endured a “really rough breakup” with a girlwho wanted to “get back together” with him, though he did not reciprocateher wish to reunite. He wanted to communicate to her the fact thathe was not willing to reconcile, but he felt constrained because he hadlearned of her desire in confidence from a mutual friend. To communicatehis feelings to her, he changed his relationship status on Facebook to “ina relationship,” even though he was not involved with anyone. At thatpoint his ex-girlfriend realized that “I was unavailable. I knew she wouldread that; I didn’t tell her or anything, but I knew that she would find it.And so that ended it officially.” His ex-girlfriend communicated back tohim in a similarly passive way:I go on her MySpace and there’s a blog about how she can finally move on. But it’saddressed to no one. Right? I know who it’s talking about; she knows who it’s talking