Dating as a Digital Performance

We’ve long afforded certain people to mine their lives for art, writing, media, what have you. Many of us, in wanting to be more like those real and fictional figures like Anaïs Nin or Carrie Bradshaw who have transformed their experiences into something for public consumption, have more quietly done the same. We do things for the plot, to tell our friends a funny story, to write about in our journal, to look back upon when we’re older. That’s a good thing. It enriches our lives to have experiences for the sake of experiences. What’s happened more recently, however, is that many of us have confused “having an experience” with “writing a tweet.”