在09年的電影《你其實不懂他的心》中，現代的分手時尚得到了充分詮釋。劇中，女演員德魯·巴里摩爾說：“我上班時收到他的語音留言，所以回到家后給他回電話。接著他發郵件到我的黑莓，我就給他發了短信。如今，我不得不檢查所有可能的通訊渠道，到頭來只發現被七種高科技拒絕了七次。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."

《新聞周刊》援引了美國印第安納大學傳播與文化學院助理教授伊蘭娜·格爾森的作品，后者曾問自己的學生“怎樣分手比較糟糕”。從學生們的反饋來看，相比分手時收到的信息，那些媒介更讓他們憤怒。他們埋怨對方通過短信、Facebook等社交網站而非本人當面提分手。

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.

受該調查啟發，格爾森教授決定深入研究這些新技術是如何改變愛情規則的。在她的新書《分手2.0:通過新媒體切斷聯系》中，格爾森寫道，受訪的所有人幾乎都認為當面分手是最體面的分手方式，但由于這種面對面的分手不能讓他們達到目的，很多人都轉而借助新媒體。

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.