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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."
18-year-old Katie Barnard's prom date text-messaged her one hour before the big night that he couldn't make it. (Laura Leyshon for the Globe and Mail)
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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.
