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Katie Barnard was having her hair curled into ringlets for her high-school prom when her cellphone rang on her lap. She flipped it open and found a text message from her date: I'm sick. I can't go.

That was it: no phone call, no explanation.

The limo was coming in one hour. Nobody goes alone to the prom in Raymond, Alta., 35 kilometres south of Lethbridge. A good chunk of the 4,000 residents flock each year to the Mormon church to watch the couples parade in like fashion models. Ms. Barnard had carefully chosen her dream dress: a champagne-coloured, floor-length gown with a shimmering train. Now, with 60 minutes to spare, she had been stood up -- by five words texted to her cellphone.

"I couldn't say anything," the 18-year-old recalls. "I was in shock."

Such are the perils of young love in a digital age, when breakups make online news, when photos of last night's drunken gropings get posted by morning -- when a cellphone flashes the news that your prom date has gone AWOL.

But the high-tech connections that have become second nature to today's teens are now spawning second thoughts: There's a cost to living and loving so publicly. Parents may worry about predators on the Internet, but young people say it's their friends, not strangers, who have the power to crush their hearts.

Back in the day -- say, 2004 -- you got dumped and friends whispered about it. Now your name gets deleted on Facebook, a social networking website, and a news bulletin alerts hundreds of people. Cellphones tether couples to each other around the clock.

Cheating is chancy: An incriminating video on YouTube can bring instant infamy. And just try stopping ugly gossip on the Net: A recent survey found that roughly three-quarters of American teens believed that having a boyfriend or girlfriend spread rumours or post embarrassing pictures online was "a serious problem."

"We still don't really understand the Internet to where we can get smart about it," concedes Nickesh Trecarten, a Grade 12 student in Ottawa. "We're like kids playing with a new toy."

And playing, and playing. At Michigan State University, for instance, 96 per cent of undergraduates are on Facebook, which boasts nearly 20 million users worldwide. In 2006, Canadians sent 4.6 billion text messages over their cellphones -- three times more than the year before.

For this generation, social capital depends on digital presence. "If you don't have a Facebook account then you're not cool," says Marie-Claude Valiquet, an 18-year-old high-school student in Ottawa.

But these new toys don't come with social-etiquette instructions. This winter, Mr. Trecarten, 17, logged on to Facebook to find a news bulletin announcing his recent ex-girlfriend had started dating a close friend. That's the Facebook way: When someone on your contact list adds a new picture or changes their profile, including relationship status, the site sends out updates like an in-house gossip rag.

"It wasn't as though one of my friends told me about it. I had to find out by computer," he says. While the three are again on speaking terms, the slight still stings.

But that's nothing: Imagine the romantic prospects of the "Commerce Creeper" after several female students at the University of Manitoba created a Facebook page last month to post cracks about his awkward attempts to get a date.

He whispered in my ear, one student wrote, and "I then ran home and washed that ear with antiseptic."

"This guy is relentless," said another.

"I have seen him hit on umpteen number of girls," posted a third.

Within a week, there were more than 220 comments, increasingly vicious. But only after the dean's office learned about it was the site taken down. "It didn't start out as an attack," says Taren Gesell, head of the Commerce Students Association. "But it snowballed and grew like a virus."

And this was no whisper campaign: Facebook works on the premise that people use their real names so friends can track them down. The Creeper himself was identified and pictured, reportedly with a covert image shot from a cellphone, and every comment was also linked to a name and face.

But there's no shame in making public gossip of private thoughts, not to a generation that lives online. "It's like they don't exist without the contact," says C. J. Pascoe, a sociologist the University of California at Berkeley.

Dr. Pascoe, who studies how the Internet influences relationships among teens, tells the story of one boy who was angry because another boy was chatting up his girlfriend. The taunts went back and forth on MySpace, a social site similar to Facebook, until they decided to settle things in person. A crowd, alerted online, showed up to watch. Someone filmed the fight with a video camera and downloaded it to YouTube, with a musical soundtrack, for the world to see.

Online teenaged passion is mostly pretty pedestrian -- Facebook is overloaded with mundane pictures of lovers posing cheek to cheek -- although technology does foster its fair share of romantic gestures.

In an updated form of note-passing, couples text-message sweet nothings across the classroom. They post frothy tributes to each other on their blogs. One smitten California boy programmed a clock on his public MySpace page to count down the minutes until he'd next see his long-distance love.

The Internet -- witness the prolific online dating industry -- can make a fine cupid. Asking someone out with instant messaging means never having to risk rejection in person; before saying yes, just click Google. Online, no one stumbles with their words. No one mangles the punchline. Heck, you can even use a dictionary.

Without Facebook, Pierre Pharand and Paola Melo would never have hooked up. Using the public comment wall on their individual sites, you can even pinpoint the precise moment in January when he proposed "maybe going for coffee" and how, six minutes later, she said yes.

Ms. Melo knew Mr. Pharand slightly through friends, but she got additional intelligence from his profile: political moderate, Seinfeld fan, studying Spanish. (Under hobbies: the ability to "pee far.") She checked his Facebook page for signs that he was seeing other women. "I didn't want to look like an idiot," she says.

Their relationship, now three months old, went official on Facebook at 10:56 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 25, when they changed their relationships status and sent the news to 300 friends. They say it was joke. You don't want to be seen taking these things too seriously.

And there's no mistaking the potential for online mischief.

When Marie-Claude Valiquet was in Grade 8, she received an e-mail from the cutest guy in class, a love letter gushing about her beauty. But next day she discovered that several other girls had received the same e-mail. The boy knew nothing about them; two popular girls had used his password to send e-mails in his name.

"In a way it was harmless, but it was total invasion of privacy," Ms. Valiquet says. And not so harmless: One girl, she recalls, was so devastated she started sobbing.

In other cases, instant messaging serves as a social crutch; the trick is living up to that wittier, wiser, Photoshopped persona.

In Grade 9, Ms. Valiquet had her first real boyfriend. For hours each night, using instant messaging, they had wonderful conversations. But in school they barely spoke. They went on two dates.

"I liked him a lot on MSN," she says. "And then you would talk to him in person, he was more shy and what he'd say didn't really compute to what he'd say on MSN." They finally broke up -- via computer -- and spent the next year ignoring each other in school. "It does become a great icebreaker," Ms. Valiquet says, but adds: "I think the only way you can become intimate with someone is face to face."

Yet relationships continue to start and split in cyberspace. Most teens seem to agree it's bad form to break up electronically, the way Britney Spears reportedly dumped Kevin Federline. But plenty of people have done it, or had it done to them.

"It's a lot easier when you don't have to deal with a face-to-face confrontation," says Natalie LeBlanc, a 22-year-old university student in New Brunswick, who admits to breaking up with five boyfriends using instant messaging. ". . . I can just say it straight up."

Then there's Peter, a student at Queen's University who doesn't want his full name used. He gave his password to his girlfriend without thinking. When he stopped calling her, he forgot to change the password. She used it to go into Facebook, he says, to change his profile to say he's gay and to send at least one negative e-mail to a potential date. "It's open season on reading other people's stuff," he says.

Stephanie, a 22-year-old living in Toronto, has a different problem: She broke up with her boyfriend in the real world, but can't remove his presence from her virtual life. She hasn't logged onto Facebook in four months, except to delete his name from the status line on her profile -- "that's kind of replaced getting rid of old letters and postcards."

His face is in her photo albums, his friends are on his contact list, his comments archived on her wall. She's not pining, she says, but it would be tempting to peek at his page. "You just have to click a button and you can instantly see how their whole world has changed since you left it." She misses being on Facebook. "You have to cut off your relationship with this whole online world to cut off your relationship with one person."

After the tell-all rush, there are signs of restraint. Some researchers partly credit the controversial newsfeed on Facebook, introduced last year, for starting a new debate about how far online information should travel, and to whom. Within 12 months, surveys of undergraduates at two U.S. universities found the number of Facebook users adding privacy restrictions to their profiles had more than doubled, to roughly 20 per cent.

Still, hardly anyone considers logging off -- which makes Tim Collins, a 23-year-old student at Mount Allison, "one of the odd ones," he says. He doesn't have a cellphone and isn't on Facebook, which he calls "Stalkernet."

He started leaving his cellphone in his dorm when his then-girlfriend kept calling when he was out with friends. He eventually got rid of it. Facebook, he says, is a disaster-in-waiting: The last thing he wants is for his dates to keep tabs on him.

"It's way too much information. People know who you're friends with, who you're going out with tonight, what you're doing all the time. It's almost like Big Brother."

As for Katie Barnard, who lost her prom date by cellphone, her night was rescued by some old-fashioned chivalry -- with a high-tech twist.

"We'll find you a date," her little sister declared, and immediately tracked down a 17-year-old friend -- on his cellphone, naturally -- who agreed to go. He borrowed a tuxedo from his pastor, and sent his mother into Lethbridge for a corsage, arriving in time for the big entrance.

They stayed up until dawn after the dance, eating piles of food with friends in a booth at Denny's. She had a great time. Thanks to text messaging, she says, she traded up.

Technoteens

Facebook

One of several social networking websites, Facebook allows users to share pictures and leave comments within a network of "friends." It's particularly popular among university students. You can track down the cute girl you met at the campus bar, find out the latest gossip through daily news bulletins and keep apprised of the weekend's hottest parties. Some U.S. universities now give new students Facebook seminars.

Instant messaging

These real-time online conversations have eclipsed e-mail among teens, who use IM to chat with multiple friends while they're supposed to be doing homework. Surveys say it's the most common online activity among high-school students. A boon to the shy types, it's especially popular for hooking up -- and, while it's considered bad taste, it's an increasingly common method of breaking up.

YouTube The video-sharing site has become a common outlet for star-crossed, heartbroken lovers to broadcast their stories to the world, and then be critiqued, or cheered up, by strangers.This Valentine's Day, a University of North Carolina senior was shown dumping his girlfriend on campus before a crowd of jeering students. More than 300,000 people logged on to watch the video. It turned out, as often happens on YouTube, that the breakup was a hoax -- an experiment that proved the power of the Internet.