Identity labels signal shared projects across wildly varied specific work

Evidence

When you read a tag like “environmental activist” in someone’s bio, you have a basic sense of what is meant. Sure, there are a lot of different things that person might actually do (anything from working full-time for an NGO trying to preserve the Brazilian rainforest, to volunteering an hour a week at a compost collection depot in Oakland), but you know what is being said: “I’m somebody who cares about the environment! I think of myself as somebody engaged with others in a big, complicated, and important project that involves trying to make the world a better place—or at least stop it from sucking worse and worse!” — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 234

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Shows what an identity label does — bundles vast diversity of practice under a shared project — which is the model attention activism hopes to reproduce.

Related

• The environmental activist identity is a recent invention requiring long cultural work (similarity 0.82)
• Environmental activism identity took decades of work to construct (similarity 0.82)
• Attention activism requires collectively building attention’s public meaning (similarity 0.80)