Beyond the Stage: A Qualitative Study of Identity Performance and Cultural Visibility in Short-Form Digital Media

Short-form digital media have become influential environments for the performance, circulation, and interpretation of culturally marked identities. This qualitative study brings these areas together to investigate how complex identities are transformed into recognizable and platform-compatible forms within short-form digital environments. The study employed interpretive document analysis and thematic synthesis of an analytical corpus of ۳۰ full-text academic publications selected for their direct relevance to identity performance, cultural visibility, multimodal representation, short-form platform practices, audience interpretation, and algorithmic circulation. The synthesis shows that digital identity visibility develops through the interaction of cultural and embodied resources, multimodal performance, platform-specific translation, visibility filtering, audience interpretation, and subsequent creator adjustment. The study introduces the concept of cultural compression to explain how historically and socially complex identities are condensed into brief, visually immediate, and recognizable signs. To integrate these relationships, the study proposes the Platformed Visibility Circuit, a recursive framework linking identity resources, multimodal performance, platform translation, visibility filtering, recognition outcomes, and adjustment. The findings demonstrate that visibility should not be equated with recognition: an identity may become widely circulated without being interpreted in its cultural complexity.

کلیدواژه ها:

Identity Performance ، Cultural Visibility ، Short-Form Digital Media ، Multimodal Self-Representation ، Platformed Visibility ، Cultural Compression ، Digital Identity ، Algorithmic Visibility