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

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.