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Abstract

This special issue explores the complex dynamics of digital visibility negotiation in Asian contexts. Emerging scholarship on this topic reveals how users strategically negotiate their visibility online. However, we still need to broaden the scope of our knowledge, especially outside Western contexts, in order to advance our theoretical understanding of such negotiations. Asian societies and communities, with their distinctive platform political economies and socio-cultural landscapes, offer rich yet underexplored contexts for advancing visibility theories beyond Western-centric frameworks. Responding to Brighenti’s call to treat visibility as an interdisciplinary social scientific category, this special issue presents 19 articles organized into four thematic clusters that analyze visibility practices across Asian communities and diasporic spaces. By centering Asian case studies and perspectives, we illustrate how visibility negotiations in Asian contexts can inform broader theoretical understandings of digital visibility negotiation practices and the power dynamics that shape them.

Keywords

Digital visibility Asia as method social media content creator cultural production identity activism

Introduction

Maintaining visibility on digital platforms has become increasingly significant in contemporary society for professionals, citizens, and communities to acquire opportunities, accumulate social capital, and expand influence. Meanwhile, recent scholarship sheds light on the phenomena of social media users strategically localizing and restricting their digital visibility, instead of solely maximizing it, to avoid conflicts or undesired attention. Various factors, including social norms, regulatory frameworks, and technological affordances, influence the negotiation of one’s digital visibility. Institutional actors and stakeholders also play crucial roles in this process as they exercise power to govern and potentially manipulate what and who should be allowed to be seen. Given these dynamics, the negotiation and contestation of digital visibility are highly culturally contextualized issues.

Scholars from various disciplines highlight how advances in media and digitization have led to new developments and challenges to recent phenomena in the study of visibility. Thompson (2005) points out that our highly mediated society has made large-scale asymmetrical visibility possible, and such mediated visibility has become the major field where social and political struggles take place. Taking this point a step further, Brighenti (2007) proposes treating visibility as a social scientific category because it is void of inherent normative values – neither inherently liberating nor oppressive – but at the same time it has the capacity to generate descriptive and interpretive analysis. Brighenti (2007) insightfully points out that most literature on visibility tends to engage with specific disciplinary silos and fails to interact with other literature in a coherent and productive dialogue. We follow his steps in treating visibility as a social scientific category and field in organizing this special issue and aim to create interdisciplinary dialogues.

Underexplored in the existing literature on digital visibility, Asian societies (including the Asian diaspora) provide intriguing contexts. Asia’s unique platform political economy and distinct socio-cultural dynamics shape its digital practices and cultures, which make contributions to the topic of digital visibility in Asian contexts highly relevant. Therefore, this special issue introduces 19 articles with specific focus on empirical analysis in Asian contexts. In this introduction, we first provide an overview of how digital visibility is defined and understood in previous literature and explain the questions that we intend to answer regarding digital visibility negotiation. We then argue for using Asia as communities, spaces, and method to theorize digital visibility negotiation practices and dynamics. The remaining part of the introduction introduces the articles grouped into four themes: content creator practices, production of cultures and knowledge, gender norms and identity, and politics and empowerment.

Four approaches to understanding visibility

We identify four main approaches to how digital visibility is studied by researchers based on the understanding of visibility advanced by Brantner and Stehle (2021) and Brighenti (2007): (1) as (passively) being ‘seen’, (2) as presence and representation, (3) as recognition, influence, and empowerment, and (4) as a structural force. It is important to note that these four approaches are intertwined, and relevant empirical research often uses multiple approaches.

The first approach treats visibility as a passive state of being seen and observed (Thompson, 2005; Brantner and Stehle, 2021), which is often related to surveillance and control (Brighenti, 2007; Lyon, 2018). This approach is usually adopted by scholars whose research is broadly related to surveillance studies. They intend to reveal how powerful actors can benefit or fulfill their desires from individuals’ visibility. These actors include state institutions, commercial entities, and other individuals. For instance, data-driven predictive policing can lead to the hyper visibility of certain groups and sections of society while making other groups and crimes less visible or even invisible (Pearson et al., 2024). Similar cases illustrate the double-bind of citizens’ digital visibility in their civic life: both the risks and the need to be seen and counted by ‘the system’ (Brighenti, 2007). Commercial entities such as platforms and retail companies have also been observing their users and consumers to collect data to improve their advertising practices (Huang and Ye, 2024; Zuboff, 2019). Such control exists in participatory surveillance, for example, digital vigilantism, where individuals’ online visibility is weaponized in the form of online naming and shaming when certain legal or moral boundaries are perceived to be breached (Huang, 2021; Trottier, 2017).

The second approach is embedded in media: visibility as presence and representation (Brantner and Stehle, 2021; Brighenti, 2007), which is usually studied through mediated texts. Visibility as presence and representation goes beyond the passive state of being seen and is mainly centered around the mediated representation that is isolated from the subject in reality (Brighenti, 2007). We want to point out that this approach to visibility is often intertwined with the third approach ‘visibility as influence’, and we see representation as the first step toward influence. The digital visibility of marginalized groups (e.g., gender, sexuality, race, class, migration) in the media is a recurrent inquiry in research on media texts, including news (Hamlin et al., 2016; Horsti, 2016; Segev, 2015), advertisements (Frankel and Ha, 2020; Ho and Tanaka, 2022; Kim and Chung, 2005), films and television (Conor, 2004; Laskar and Reyaz, 2024; Nguyen, 2025), and social media content (Aziz, 2024; Shahin and Hou, 2025; Taylor and Abidin, 2024). In this line of research, media scholars specifically pay close attention to the construction of representations, the lack of representations, and various misrepresentations. Thompson (2005) rightly points out that achieving this form of visibility is the precondition for gaining recognition and advancing one’s cause in the public sphere, which leads us to the next form: recognition, influence, and empowerment (Brantner and Stehle, 2021; Thompson, 2005).

This third approach focuses on the social nature of visibility (Brighenti, 2007), particularly in the public sphere (Dahlberg, 2018). Visibility is understood as recognition, influence, and empowerment, which connects minority groups to the mainstream in a non-linear manner (ibid.). Visibility in this approach also results in social capital that can potentially turn into other types of capital (Bourdieu, 1986), especially in the form of economic gains or influence on how a cultural product takes shape (Huang and Janssens, 2019). In most relevant empirical research on digital activism and social movements, the term of ‘visibility’ refers to social influence without being explicitly indicated (Ciszek et al., 2023; Clark-Parsons, 2021; Evans, 2020; Uldam, 2018; Wang and Keane, 2020). The term politics of visibility (Milan, 2015) illustrates the role of visibility in social movements clearly: groups deliberately make themselves and their concerns visible in the public sphere as a form of political action, which involves strategic choices about when, how, and where to become visible. However, the role of visibility in society can be more fundamental. Due to contemporary socio-political conditions such as mediatization (Couldry and Hepp, 2013; Väliverronen, 2021) and platformization (Van Dijck et al., 2018; Hutchinson, 2021), visibility has also become a structural force, which is the fourth approach to understanding visibility.

The fourth approach is to study visibility as a structural force, which has also been argued and explained by many scholars. Two key concepts that capture how visibility structures mediated social interactions are economies of visibility and regime of visibility. Banet-Weiser (2015, 2018) coins the term economies of visibility to explain that the logic of visibility increasingly structures our mediascapes and daily lives, fundamentally transforming how political categories like race and gender function. The visibility of identities becomes an end in itself rather than a means to political actions, as visibility is absorbed into economic structures (ibid.). This insight has guided many other scholars’ analyses of visibility as a structural force in contemporary platform economy. Other researchers use the term regime of visibility to argue that social media platforms’ technical and architectural organizations constitute participatory subjectivity through the threat of invisibility, which is prevalent in contemporary promotional industries (Bucher, 2012; Jiménez-Martínez and Edwards, 2023). From the perspective of civic society, the structural power of digital visibility is also demonstrated in the fact that various forms of digital visibility are conditions for a healthy public sphere, where the expression of visible disagreement, the possibility of equal participation, and the mechanism to keep the powerful accountable are facilitated to achieve democracy (Dahlberg, 2018).

This structural power of visibility is encoded into social media platform affordances (Bucher, 2012), the political economy of platforms (Abidin, 2018; Poell et al., 2021), and the attention/reputation economy (Goldhaber, 1997; Hearn, 2010; Marwick, 2015). Researchers who engage with critical labor studies often adopt this productive lens. Abidin (2016) coined the concept of visibility labor to describe individuals’ work which curates their self-presentations for better recognition and perceptions among various stakeholders in the attention economy. Bounded by the regime of visibility, content creators actively engage in practices and labor such as playing the visibility game (Cotter, 2019; Duffy and Hund, 2019), algorithmic gossip (Bishop, 2019), algorithmic imaginaries (Richter and Ye, 2023), and algorithmic folklore/folk theories (Savolainen, 2022; Siles et al., 2020), where they collectively come up with communally and socially informed theories and strategies about recommender algorithms that determine visibility on social media platforms. These forms of labor are usually gendered, feminized, and exploitative (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2016; Ye and Krijnen, 2024). This regime of visibility embedded in platform features, algorithms, and capitalism results in multi-faceted precarities for individuals participating in the platform economies (Abidin, 2020; Duffy et al., 2021). These patterns are also observed in other fields, which is captured vividly by Bishop’s (2023) concept of influencer creep, where individuals have to conduct digital-visibility-focused influencer-like work. Researchers illustrate this trend in activism (as discussed earlier in the politics of visibility), business (Wang and Keane, 2020), arts and crafts (Evans, 2020; Gandini et al., 2025), academia (Duffy and Pooley, 2017; Maddox, 2024; Magoqwana et al., 2019), and science communication (Lewis and Grantham, 2022; Zeng and Yan, 2024).

Main inquiries in conceptualizing digital visibility negotiation

The majority of the research discussed thus far focuses on individuals’ and communities’ efforts to gain or maintain digital visibility. However, an increasing number of researchers look into how social media users also try to limit or manage their digital visibility. Content creators adopt various algorithmic practices and develop strategies to achieve selective visibility (Jaramillo-Dent, 2022), especially when they belong to marginalized groups and frequently experience visibility harm such as trolling, doxxing, and harassment (Stegeman et al., 2024). Similar practices can also be found among activists (Lokot, 2018), fans (Zhang et al., 2023), and common users (Magalhães, 2022; Sobieraj, 2018) for reasons ranging from state censorship to personal political preferences, or identity.

These discussions on digital visibility negotiation tend to center around algorithmic practices and the platform-born production and consumption dynamics on social media platforms. However, we call for a broader scope when discussing and conceptualizing digital visibility negotiation dynamics, because many other relevant dichotomies are being negotiated in addition to visibility and invisibility. We set out to answer the following inquiries informed by these dichotomies with our special issue. How do individuals and communities perceive, and researchers understand visibility on digital platforms as empowerment, control, or exploitation? How is visibility negotiated in public and private spheres, as well as between them? What types of digital visibility are negotiated, mediated or embodied, despatialized or localized? Whose digital visibility is negotiated, individual or collective?

By attending to these inquiries, we provide a comprehensive analytical framework about digital visibility negotiation practices. We are specifically interested in exploring what counts as digital visibility, why people negotiate digital visibility, what is negotiated, and what the power relations are in digital visibility negotiation.

Researching digital visibility negotiation in Asia: As communities, spaces, and method

To further theorize the dynamics in digital visibility negotiation, we need to go beyond case studies that center around Silicon Valley platforms and Anglophone socio-cultural norms and structures. We propose to center Asia in this endeavor. We want to first acknowledge that Asia and Asian-ness are contested and colonial concepts. It is not our intention to argue that Asia provides a unified context to study digital visibility negotiation. Rather, we see Asia as communities, spaces, and method.

The special issue’s attention to Asia exemplifies our emphasis on the negotiation of digital visibility in the face of social and economic incongruities and political and cultural contestations. While all regions and landmasses are diverse, none match the shared yet contested histories and identities that Asia embodies. It is home to the world’s two most populous nations, India and China: their combined online population of 2 billion is larger than that of any other continent. The vagaries of ethnicity, social structure, language, and politics within and between these two nations, not to mention their cross-border rivalry, require a closer look at practices of digital visibility on their own.

China’s geopolitical ambitions, as much as the domestic political compulsions of the Communist Party, shape the contours of cyberspace – evident, for instance, in the emergence of a homegrown digital ecology comprising platforms that rival Silicon Valley behemoths. Several articles in this special issue illusrate these dynamics. On the one hand, marginalized groups ranging from queer content creators to underground music producers need to negotiate their visibility on platforms like WeChat, not only to elide censorship but also to work around the heteronormativity of digital publics (Huang, 2025; Shi, 2024; Vierbergen, 2025). On the other hand, a platform such as Douyin can also provide a voice to Burmese migrants to contend with stigmas of their own (Zhang and Liu, 2024) – even as China’s digital diaspora takes recourse to X for political communication (Zeng and Fang, 2025). In India, meanwhile, the politics of sexual identity can play out in the form of women leaders strategically employing gendered performances and reproducing colonial legacies on Facebook and X in order to win elections (Banerjee and Mitra, 2024).

While China and India are ancient civilizations adjusting to the digital age, South Korea’s popular music industry, or K-pop, is a digital native phenomenon. More than a decade since Psy’s Gangnam Style video broke visibility records on YouTube, bands such as BTS and Blackpink have transformed K-pop into a globally popular genre. It owes its international success as much to the ‘institutional construction of global audiences’ (Liu and Taneja, 2025) as it does to the efforts of online fan communities within and beyond Asia (Pham and Tran-Mai, 2025). Indeed, K-pop’s popularity can drive global attention to news from South Korea and turn real-life tragedies into digital spectacles (Choi and Shahin, 2025). Many of Asia’s postcolonial nations continue to struggle with economic as well as digital inequality. Those who are most in need of access to and visibility through digital technology often have the least of it, necessitating negotiations not only with the algorithms and affordances of digital platforms but also with the norms and values of the societies they inhabit, from the Philippines to Azerbaijan (Lim et al., 2025; Pearce, 2024). But Asia also includes a nation such as Japan, which once colonized its neighbors, and where this colonial past continues to loom large over contemporary political fault lines. Antipathy towards its colonial history inspires decolonial solidarities in Japan, for instance against Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, that are constructed and contested online (Kasianenko, 2025).

But even as languages and ethnicities, social structures and politics vary, most Asian societies share the historical experience of colonialism – the source of many of the political and social boundaries along which contemporary identities have been constructed. Another common experience is dispossession: in many Asian countries, the richest few pockets a third to half of the national income even as the poorest struggle to survive. Even when absent, digital visibility is closely implicated in these struggles. The economics of digitalization often reinforces these inequities even as the attention economy of digital platforms erases them from view.

Edouard Glissant famously remarked that the West ‘is a project, not a place’. The same might be said of Asia. Once conjured up as a European colonial project, it can take matters into its own hands, so to speak. Chen (2010) provocatively suggested the idea of Asia as method, a project that comprised ‘using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point [so that] societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference’ (xv). Developing such an Asian consciousness would mean that diverse nations, communities, and groups that constitute Asia can rely upon and learn from each other and mobilize the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia to provide alternative horizons and perspectives.

This special issue’s emphasis on the negotiation of digital visibility in Asia is a step in this direction. It aspires to produce knowledge that derives validity from localization but simultaneously inspires relatability through juxtaposed contexts and conditions. While recognizing Asia as part of a global community, it sheds light on intra-Asian flows of people, ideas, and experiences and brings attention to their transformative potential.

Articles in this special issue

To collectively address the questions mentioned in the previous section, this special issue presents 19 original research articles. These papers offer insights into a wide range of digital platforms and cultural contexts, using a variety of methods. To introduce them, we have organized the articles into four interrelated thematic sections, these being content creator practices, production of cultures and knowledge, gender norms and identity, and politics and empowerment.

The first section looks into content creator practices, featuring four studies exploring visibility negotiation across diverse cultures and platforms. Shi’s (2024) ethnographic work, ‘Queering algorithms: LGBTQ+ content creators’ non-conforming and non-confronting workarounds to digital normativity in China’, focuses on queer content creators in China, examining their nuanced visibility strategies across various platforms while challenging heteronormative social norms in the Chinese digital space. Zhang et al. (2025) piece, ‘Intermediated visibility: A case study of creators and MCNs in Singapore’, sheds light on the Singaporean context, exploring how intermediaries such as Multi-Channel Networks shape creators’ visibility practices in local regulatory contexts. The other two pieces in this section offer a cross-cultural perspective, while juxtaposing two contrasting forms of transitional visibility negotiation – one associated with the so-called ‘White privilege’ and the other with xenophobia. Kim and Kim’s (2024) ‘Whiteness construction in South Korean digital spaces: Oliver-ssaem’s strategic identity-distancing for visibility on YouTube’ presents an in-depth analysis of the American content creator’s popularity in South Korea. It explores how Whiteness is transformed into content and commodity as a visibility strategy in the digital space in Asia. In contrast, Zhang and Liu’s (2024) case study, ‘Struggle Over Visibility on Douyin’, sheds light on how Burmese diasporic influencers deploy varied content creation strategies to navigate through stigmas associated with their heritage on Chinese short-video platforms.

The second section’s five articles offer insights into the interplay between visibility practices and the production of culture and knowledge. The first piece, ‘Fractured spectacle: Contrasting reactions to Itaewon stampede across Korean and English-language networked publics’ by Choi and Shahin (2025) compares networked sense-making communities that emerged following the 2022 Itaewon Halloween stampede on X (formerly Twitter). Informed by results from topic modeling and network analysis, the study underscores disparities in the focal points and representations between English and Korean-language communities. The following three articles commonly address social media engagement by the music industry. ‘Social media platforms and the logics of marginalized knowledge production in East Asia’ by Mouillot (2025) draws our attention to Hong Kong’s independent music scene. Through case studies of four independent music promoters and organizers, the study investigates how music actors leverage platform-based logics to overcome infrastructural limitations, fostering visibility, and cultural knowledge. In the next paper, ‘Negotiating underground status through hybrid visibilities: WeChat event promotion in Shanghai music and performance scenes’, Vierbergen (2025) guides us through the underground music scene in Shanghai, discussing how these music communities circumvent censorship and WeChat’s constraints to strategize their visibility. Moving from the underground to the mainstream, Liu and Taneja’s (2025) paper, ‘Visibility of K-pop in the U.S.: Global rankings, “audience mis-aggregation,” and mainstream attention to niche genre’, critically examines the ranking system for mainstream music audiences, focusing on the prominent visibility of BTS in the U.S. Finally, ‘Meme and label: Media convergence and digital visibility of “Mutai Danshen” in Chinese audiovisual media’ by Liang and Hyun (2025) explores the mediated contestation and memeification of singlehood, with a focus on how media convergence in the Chinese entertainment sector and digital meme culture contribute to the visibility of this concept and associated societal reflection.

The third section of the special issue features five papers that closely engage with the topic of gender norms and identity. Three papers in the section explore how online communities circumvent visibility restrictions on queer representation and gender diversity in China. It begins with Huang’s (2025) ‘A Chinese queer subtitling community’s digital visibility management: An alternative approach’ based on a year-long netnography of Chinese queer subtitling communities. It highlights nuanced practices of visibility employed to navigate the heteronormative and restricted media environment in mainland China, while also promoting access to queer content and facilitating community development. Hu and Liu’s (2024) ‘Reclaiming and remediating space: The dynamics of queer presence in audio drama platform’ examines how the Boy Love fandom uses audio-based platforms to bypass censorship and sustain the subculture. Bernot et al. (2024), in ‘“The glowing fireflies”: Invisible activism under China’s queer necropolitics’, explore how the state’s oppressive approach toward LGBTIQ+ communities has led to the emergence of what the authors term invisible activism, a self-sustaining approach to advocating for gender equity. This section also features two articles by Pham and Tran-Mai (2025) and Banerjee and Mitra (2024), which critically engage with feminine gender norms and feminism in Asian digital spaces. Pham and Tran-Mai’s (2025) ‘“You’re not invited”: Negotiating feminism within digital public sphere surrounding Lisa’s exotic dance’ examines online discourse in Vietnam after K-pop megastar Lisa’s performance at a burlesque club. Banerjee and Mitra’s (2024) ‘Reconstituting the “good woman”: Gendered visual politics on social media during 2021 state election in West Bengal, India’ focuses on women politicians’ self-representation and how they construct their visibility and identity on social media. Both studies emphasize the importance of recognizing the impact of local socio-cultural norms and interpretations when researching femininity and feminism in the Asian digital space.

The special issue concludes with five articles that address diverse issues related to politics and empowerment. Two of the papers in this section focus on peripheral Asian language communities on X, examining their role in transnational discussions of political events Kasianenko’s (2025) ‘Boosting the distant Other: Visibility practices on Japanese Twitter during Russia’s war on Ukraine’ employs network analysis and interview insights to explore how Japanese Twitter users engage with and support Ukraine. Similarly, Zeng & Fang’s (2025) study ‘Negotiating issue visibility in the diaspora: A study of political discussion within Jianzhong Quan on X, 2014-2023’ provides insights into Chinese diasporic communities’ political expression and their engagement with political discussions about China, using a translational and network analysis approach. The section also features two empirical studies focusing on the digital space in the Philippines. ‘Band of blood brothers: Exploring visibility management and networking among Twitter users identifying as Filipino men living with HIV’ by Lim et al. (2025), critically discusses the role of visibility on X in fostering social support for the marginalized communities, while also addressing the associated risks. Moving to youth and social media, ‘Ambivalent visibilities: Social media bullying and disconnective practice of the youth’ by Bernadas et al. (2025) examines how Filipino youth use disconnectivity and visibility management strategies as forms of resistance and empowerment coping with challenging online spaces. Lastly, Pearce’s (2024) ‘Managing the visibility of dissent: Stigma, social media, and family relationships among Azerbaijani activists’ explores how young Azerbaijani activists manage the visibility of their political identities within an authoritarian context, highlighting the complex role of social media in both facilitating and their strategies.

Conclusion

When considering what counts as digital visibility, we should extend our investigation into the practices that transcend digital and embodied realms (e.g., the online/offline promotion of underground clubbing scenes), visibility of issues (political expression), and visibility in other human senses (e.g., audibility). Beyond varying degrees of visibility (invisibility, visibility, hypervisibility), the negotiation of digital visibility also includes transmedia (e.g., meme to mass media), transcultural (e.g., cross-border and diaspora content production), and cross-platform. Unconsciously navigating the four forms of digital visibility, individuals and communities can negotiate the aforementioned aspects for their own professionalization in the platform economy, control over narratives or resources, and constructing communities or identities. Scholars who intend to explore digital visibility negotiations in the future should engage further with nuanced discussions about relevant power relations. This includes the power of state institutions and commercial interests (incl. platforms and legacy industries), as well as other social institutions and various forms of intersectionality. We consider it valuable to view digital visibility negotiation as more than a phenomenon to be studied empirically, as well as to use it as a conceptual framework to understand and clarify some contested terms (e.g., underground, subculture).

Our special issue takes steps towards de-Westernization by intervening in the current state of research about visibility as a field and advancing inter-regional and intra-regional communication among the scholars. However, our attempt falls short in the intra-Asia referencing, which is an important element in Chen’s (2010) appeal. Therefore, we call for scholars from and/or in Asia to take Asian countries as reference points for each other’s work, instead of the West, given the shared histories and cultural proximity. More attention should be paid to international localism (Chen, 1992) and transnational cultural diffusion across Asian countries (Iwabuchi, 2002). Such an approach is urgent in research about media, communication, and technology, which are increasingly digitized within and across boundaries, and also because existing research remains strongly Western-oriented.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the invaluable input from all peer reviewers that makes this special issue possible.

ORCID iDs

Qian Huang

Jing Zeng

Hiromi Tanaka

Saif Shahin

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Negotiating digital visibility in Asia: Rethinking conceptual frameworks through (g)local communities and practices

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Four approaches to understanding visibility

Main inquiries in conceptualizing digital visibility negotiation

Researching digital visibility negotiation in Asia: As communities, spaces, and method

Articles in this special issue

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

ORCID iDs

References