In my peer group, breaking up with someone via text still inspires words like coward and jerk. In my parents day, dumping your former honey over the phone was the absolute worst. Yet, as we get further and further into the digital dating age, phone breakups are starting to sound better to me — a real voice, even minus the face, seems refreshing in a world of Twitter, Facebook, email and text.

If your last romance ended in a face-to-face conversation, count yourself blessed. We found a sad survey on the mobile social network MocoSpace that discovered that out of 20,000 people they talked to, 57 percent do their dumping over the phone, with 47 percent texting the dumpee.

Even though I think a breakup text is coldhearted, my 21 year old brother totally disagrees. Since so many of his conversations take place over text, email, IM, and online networks, getting dumped/hitched/asked out over a text seems like an everyday occurrence. Is this just a gender thing? I am involved in those means of communication too, but a text breakup seems to be the worst.

What do you think?

As it seems to reason, all shorthand textual communication is now patented by IBM. At least this is the conclusion I came to after reading the following on TechDirt–

theodp writes “The USPTO has granted IBM a patent covering the Resolution of Abbreviated Text in an Electronic Communications System, lawyer-speak for translating “IMHO” to “In My Humble Opinion” and vice versa. From the patent: “One particularly useful application of the invention is to interpret the meaning of shorthand terms…For example, one database may define the shorthand term ‘LOL’ to mean ‘laughing out loud.'”

I for one am interested in what implications this could have on our increasingly textual-heavy way of communicating with each other. Will it spell the end to such speech? Or is IBM merely patenting this concept so others will not abuse it? Only time will tell.

Further reading-

IBM’s Patent

Artistic example of said patent