Last week I wrote about the curious case of traditional love narratives in the face of online dating. In short, the profiled format, pay structure, and overall bureaucracy of online dating throws into stark relief the constructed belief in a fateful meeting of souls. And yet, the narrative persists. Here’s a brief snippet:

…[T]he landscape has drastically changed but the narrative, not so much. The maintenance of romantic love as a cultural construct, personal striving, and affective embodied response to courtship rituals speaks to the resiliency of normative culture and its instantiation through human action. Even as we transact and negotiate romantic relationships; even as we agree upon terms; even as we screen partners and subject ourselves to screening; we nonetheless speak of butterflies and hope for magic.

In the case of love and online dating, the narrative is both highlighted and strengthened through its empirical contradiction.

This idea sparked an interesting conversation among the Cyborgology team about how this principle—constitution through contradiction—is theoretically useful in understanding the relationship between technologies and culture. Technologies reflect cultural realities, but can also expose the constructed nature of these realities, threatening their taken-for-granted logic and concomitant guidance over behavior and interaction. In the face of such a threat, however, the logics remain, and even strengthen.

In addition to the fate-based love narrative, an example that sticks out is that of personal authenticity. Authenticity is the idea that the self—including desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—are uncalculated, spontaneous, and true to a unique core being. The structure of social media, however, reveals the performative nature of self-presentation and social engagement, posing a threat to the authenticity of individual social media users, and the idea of authenticity more generally. Text based communication and atemporal interaction structures suggest effort and forethought—rather than spontaneity; profiles afford telling—rather than showing—who a person is; the problem of context collision and its solutions— selective privacy settings, lowest common denominator sharing, wall cleaning etc.— reveal the distinct versions of self performed for varied audiences. And yet, authenticity persists as a narrative both personally and culturally. Indeed, rather than question the compulsory value of authenticity in the face of exposure, social media users staunchly police those who fail to live up to the authentic ideal. The mechanisms by which they do so is the topic of a whole paper I wrote a couple of years back.

Identifying constitution through contradiction as a theoretical principle which underlies these two empirical examples opens the door for particular kinds of cultural analyses. Such analyses look quite similar to those employed in the microsociology tradition of ethnomethodology.  Ethnomethodologists contend that the logics and assumptions of an interaction situation reveal themselves to interactants most clearly when that situation falls apart. The job of the social scientist, they argue, is to document the work of interactants as they put the situation back together, returning logics and assumptions to their proper place outside of conscious thought.

Extending the ethnomethodological method to cultural—rather than interpersonal—realities, new technologies, when they threaten existing narratives, become a key mechanism by which to identify these narratives and examine how these narratives are accomplished. That is, new technologies can threaten to unravel narratives; to make them fall apart. When they persist, there is much to be learned from the work of keeping the narratives firmly held together.

I close now, with some questions.  Besides authenticity and love, where else do we see this principle in action? That is, which other narratives are threatened by new technologies and still persist? And perhaps the more interesting question, where, if anywhere, does this principle not hold up? Can we think of examples in which new technologies have effectively obliterated existing narratives or cultural logics?

Thoughts are welcome in the comments and on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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