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Boston Globe

‘Pebbling' is the latest scourge of our digital age

There's power in naming. Sexting, ghosting, trolling, the inimitable Dad text — pebbling has joined the pantheon of normalized digital communications. To pebble or not to pebble, that is the question. Pebbling is what researchers studying Gentoo penguins in Antarctica call the species' courtship ritual of offering small rocks to desired mates. The term first entered the lexicon for human expressions to describe how the neurodivergent give small tokens to build connections IRL and to express affection without language. Pebbling has since been applied to the wider population as an enhanced form of digital communication. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Before the internet and in a time that seems as distant as when the paleo diet was popular because mastodon was the only item on the menu, my mother snail-mailed me newspaper clippings. These were typically about the low odds of earning money as an actress — my chosen profession — and how teaching would provide greater financial stability. She scoured all known media to find articles that were passive aggressively triggering without crossing the line to aggressively aggressively triggering. It was an art form. It was her love language. I'd receive these missives once a week, roll my eyes, and then read them — a reliable source of cringe hilarity — out loud in my scene study class. Advertisement My completely unscientific polling of Facebook friends suggests there are few pebble agnostics. To be clear, most of your friends are on board when you text a pic of your plate of picarones in Peru. And interspecies-love GIFs — a Advertisement My daily pebble pile consists of the following subtypes: The Confirmation Bias Pebble Memes, videos, and links to media with political leanings that mirror those of the chain's recipients. Parody videos that so closely resemble reality that they command a 'wWait, is that real?' moment. Reaped from the Ddoom Sscroll, these outrages jolt the receiver out of the fleeting illusions that feeling calm is a form of resistance. They might be accompanied by the label: THIS! The 'You, Go, Girl' Pebble Anything with Tina and Amy, Tina or Amy, girlfriend, tiny house compounds where we're all gonna grow old together, Tina and Amy Pphotoshopped into our tiny house compound. These are often labeled: THIS! Advertisement The Hot Stone Massage Pebble Breathe, Keep Living Off -the -Menu, ' 'It feels like stoning,' said one of my respondents. 'What's the etiquette?' one of my survey respondents asked. 'If I respond to each one, I can't get any work done.' 'IDK,' I replied, because writing out the words 'I don't know' requires too much of an effort in 2025. I'd been stumped because a close friend who relocated to a different part of the country has adopted pebbling as her preferred communication, and as the stones left unturned stack up, it seems like just another brick in the cyberspace wall that separates us. 'Is there a polite way to make it stop?' I asked Shari Foos, a marriage and family therapist and a friend, after receiving a pebble of unsettling provenance. Foos is the founder of Foos encouraged me to have a 'heart to heart' with my friend. 'Pebbling may be a quick way for somebody to blow an air kiss,' she says, 'but it's turned into yet another one-way form of communication.' She says that constant exposure to 'the noise on the internet,' — what she calls 'the cult of culture,' — fragments our already fragile concept of authentic versus transactional associations. Every virtual space we enter feeds us 'media and marketing propaganda that confuses and shames you into conforming to groupthink, unattainable standards, and superficial goals,' she says. Advertisement The pebble that prompted my call to Foos is one I received from three women in one day. It came bearing a link to an Instagram video beamed in from the Mmanosphere and starring an unidentified Frenchman who was bro-splaining to 'Jonathans' the reasons dating has become problematic. 'Y ou're not competing with other guys,' he tells his phone's camera. 'There are no other guys. You're competing with her sacred silence, her weighted blanket, her cat named Chairman Meow, and the simple joy of not having to share her fries.' As with French fries, I can't consume just one, so over the next hour of my life that I'll never get back, I watched a dozen more videos before realizing that the account is an advertisement for a #women empowerment coach. There is no free pebble, people. I thought of the penguins. The pebbles they offer become the foundations for their nests. But are the virtual ones humans blast out fostering our feelings of connection or just shoring up one another's algorithms? A notable exception, in my survey, to the pebble disdain comes from a pair of friends who share an affection for Aretha Franklin and exchange Aretha-related pebbles all day long. But that's an agreed upon, mutual thing, like sharing your Wordle. I've been around long enough to remember the hours spent gabbing with my girlfriends on my pink princess phone. Coiling and uncoiling the cord, reveling in the kinked (not kinky) connection. 'I just pebbled to say I love you,' a friend texted today along with a link to another rando Insta meme. I love you too , I wanted to text back. And, I'd give anything to hear your voice. Advertisement