Ghosting

I have a confession to make. When I am tired and unmotivated at the gym I "phone it in" and ride the stationary bike and read trashy magazines. This doesn't happen too often, mainly because there aren't a lot of magazines so it's rare that I find a new one. Besides, this is Ithaca so there are some dull hippie magazines like Mother Earth News. Bleah. when I'm phoning it in I need brain candy.
Anyway, they got an issue of Cosmo so I eagerly hit the exercise bike. There was an article about what to do when your boyfriend just drops off the face of the earth. They even had a term for it - "ghosting", as well as descriptions of what to do when it happens at different times (early on, 6 months, a year). In the last few weeks I'd also read an account in the New York Times about someone whose fairly serious long term boyfriend suddenly cut off all contact, and T had someone ghost him around the same time that cowdude went all Casper on me, so women are guilty of it too.
Call me an old-fashioned old biddy, but is this some sort of new, crappy trend? I've been reading trashy magazines since I was a kid and this is the first I've heard of it. I don't mean disappearing early on - I've heard about that in the past. I mean thinking that it is ok to just disappear after a few months or more. Did some people misinterpret the general rule of thumb that you shouldn't break up over the phone or electronically to mean that it's better to just disappear? Is this some sort of new bad habit that is somehow being made easier by our reliance on the internet, cell phones, Facebook, etc.? I don't really know.
What I do know now, of course, is to be more of a honey badger and not let it get to that point ever again.