Narrative Construction of Self-Coherence in the Virtual Space

Abstract

While social psychologists warn us that the search for self-coherence brings cognitive biases, marketers and public relations specialists define consistency as the main ingredient of personal branding campaigns. Taking a moderate path, sociologists theorize self-coherence as a coping mechanism for rewriting self-biographies to colonize the future, assuming the narrative as a self-coherence-inducing device. We considered the emergence of personal blogs as a suitable setting to study the narrative construction of the self during late modernity. We present a narrative-constructivist analysis of data collected from personal blogs (the top 46 Romanian personal blogs in terms of popularity, and 100 blogs participating in a digital archiving memory project) in the period of emergence and unprecedented momentum. We found evidence of three narrative tactics for building self-coherence in the virtual space: temporal coherence, causal coherence, and thematic coherence.