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Identity theory (IT) and social identity theory (SIT) are eminent research programs from sociology and psychology, respectively. We test collective identity as a point of convergence between the two programs. Collective identity is a subtheory of SIT that pertains to activist identification. Collective identity maps closely onto identity theory's group/social identity, which refers to identification with socially situated identity categories. We propose conceptualizing collective identity as a type of group/social identity, integrating activist collectives into the identity theory model. We test this conceptualization by applying identity theory hypotheses to the "vegan" identity, which is both a social category and part of an active social movement. Data come from comments on two viral YouTube videos about veganism. One video negates prevailing meanings of the vegan identity. A response video brings shared vegan identity meanings back into focus. Identity theory predicts that nonverifying identity feedback elicits negative emotion and active behavioral response, while identity verification elicits positive emotion and an attenuated behavioral response. We test these tenets using sentiment analysis and word counts for comments across the two videos. Results show support for identity theory hypotheses as applied to a collective social identity. We supplement results with qualitative analysis of video comments. The findings position collective identity as a bridge between IT and SIT, demonstrate innovative digital methods, and provide theoretical scaffolding for mobilization research in light of emergent technologies and diverse modes of activist participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using 77 status-imbalanced dyads, we experimentally test the effect of status on identity stability, setting the stage for research on identity change. From an identity theory perspective, we hypothesize that those with higher status will maintain greater identity stability over the course of a task-oriented interaction than their relatively lower status partners. We further test the role of identity-discrepant information. Results indicate that higher status actors are better able to maintain stable identity meanings than those with lower status. However, this relationship dissipates when situational meanings contrast with high-status actors’ self-views. More generally, this indicates that high status positively affects identity stability, yet high-status actors remain vulnerable to situational inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Curation is a key mechanism of sociality in a digital era.With an abundance of information, sifting, sorting, selecting, hiding, and standing out become laborious tasks. While researchers have diligently documented people’s curatorial strategies, digital curation remains undertheorized in its own right. I therefore theorize digital curation by disentanglingproductive curationfromconsumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that they share, and that which they consume. I embed these agentic curatorial practices within structural bounds, both social and technological. In doing so, I offer a basic theoretical model that captures a dynamic relationship between individual curators, their social networks, and technological design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasing prevalence of digital social technologies in everyday life affects processes of self and identity in theoretically and empirically interesting ways. Based on face-to-face interviews ( N = 17) and synchronous text-based exchanges ( N = 32) from a Facebook-based population, I examine the conditions of identity negotiation in a networked era, and explore how social actors strike a presentational balance between ideal and authentic. I identify three key interaction conditions: fluidity between digital and physical, expectations of accuracy, and overlapping social networks. I argue that social actors accomplish the ideal-authentic balance through self-triangulation, presenting a coherent image in multiple arenas and through multiple media. I differentiate between two degrees of triangulation: networked logic and preemptive action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. In an effort to further theorize context collapse, we draw on this literature to consider the conditions under which context collapse occurs, offering key conceptual tools with which to address these conditions. Specifically, we distinguish two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse intocontext collusionsandcontext collisions. The former is an intentional collapsing of contexts, while the latter is unintentional. We further examine the ways in which both technological architectures and agentic user practices combine to facilitate and mitigate the various effects of collapsing contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The present work, through an ethnographic study of MySpace (N =96), examines the ways in which authenticity is accomplished within a labor-exposing space. To maintain authenticity, actors must make invisible the extensive labor of self-presentation. Certain online spaces, such as social network sites and personal interactive homepages, can be thought of as labor-exposing spaces, in that they give actors clear and explicit control over self-representations, making impressions of spontaneity difficult to accomplish (). I discuss and delineate several strategies used by participants to maintain authenticity on MySpace. I conclude that while the priorities of identity processes remain stable over time, the ways in which we accomplish identity are culturally, historically and materially contingent. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses aspects of Transabled.org., an online community for people with body integrity identity disorder (BID), with details on how BID is collectively constructed and individually articulated through the introduction statements of twenty-two bloggers. The author provides an overview on how bloggers essentialize their impairment-needs, painting a picture of a ruptured self. She enables the bloggers to describe their impairment-needs as existential and deeply intrinsic supporting them in several ways, such as focusing on childhood. She then argues that the essentialist narrative locates impairment-needs within a natural frame and in doing so acts as a form of moral stigma resistance.