Narrative construction of self-coherence in the virtual space

• Main Authors: C. I. REZEANU, C. COMAN
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Transilvania University of Brasov Publishing House 2018-07-01
• Series: Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov: Series VII: Social Sciences, Law
• Subjects: Internet; blogs; self-consistency; personal construct; autobiographic memory
• Online Access: http://webbut.unitbv.ro/bulletin/Series%20VII/2018/CERSS/16%20REZEANU%20COMAN_BUT%20special_2018.pdf

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.