9. If I Twitter About a Cute Barista?
Another from the mailbag. The thing is, when you Twitter about a cute girl in front of you, you know she isn’t on Twitter at that exact moment to read it. (Even if you do have an iPhone and live in the Mission or Williamsburg or whatever it is and kids today etc. etc. etc.) What you’re doing is, to abuse post-structuralist theorists Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, performing a flirtation. You are casting this flirtation, like a spell, out in public — or, a semi-public. But a possible shared public all the same. True, the target of your flirtation may never see it. You telling her she is “cute” in a broadcast communications medium in a sense makes her cute, to all who just have to trust that she is, because they are not there with you. Sedgwick would call this a “speech act” — similar to, “It’s a boy!” at the birth of a child, or, in a marriage ceremony, “I do.” Butler may say, you may not be flirting, but such distinctions matter little — you are performing the role of the flirt. Your readers see your pronouncement of the barista as “cute” and recognize the behavior — you, distractedly and quite possibly against the adorably hand-printed rules of cafe behavior, Twittering from line that you spotted someone cute serving you a beverage. You aren’t flirting with the barista. You are flirting with someone in your audience that you hope will recognize your words, your performance, as flirty — as making you a flirt — as someone who does flirt, who they, too, can flirt with.
