Urban dwellers adopt identities through assumed rather than spoken ratification

Evidence

Sometimes the game is played in a more subtle, a more inward manner. I refer here to the expression of identity that accompanies being present in the appropriate location and I or dressing for the pan. Here the individual makes no verbal claim to the identity in question. Nor does he receive any verbal ratification for it. Instead, his knowledge of urban meanings allows him to assume that if he appears in a cenain place and/ or in a certain way, those about him will make the appropriate “identification” and this “assumed” ratification is sufficient. The shy young man, ill at ease and unsuccessful with women, can, at least for a moment, “be” the swinger of his secret dreams by the simple expedient of standing about in a body bar “looking cool.” — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 969

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Introduces the distinction between verbal claim/ratification and ‘assumed ratification’ — a precise conceptual mechanism for how low-information identity games work in anonymous public space.
• XREF: This is exactly the cognitive tool Lofland maps that Cole’s narrator lacks — the psychic limit the reader is tracing: the observer cannot perform even this inward identity ratification.

Related

• Urban appearance alone can confer identity without any verbal claim (similarity 0.93)
• City dwellers can assume stranger ratification without a word spoken (similarity 0.90)
• City dwellers read identities and perform behavior from learned repertoires (similarity 0.79)