Parallel Worlds of Recognition: Identity, Attention Economies, and Affective Polarization in Digital Communication

The expansion of digitally mediated communication has transformed how individuals construct identity, negotiate recognition, and interpret social reality. Social media platforms are frequently associated with anxiety, polarization, misinformation, and the fragmentation of public discourse, yet existing explanations often emphasize either technological design features or individual psychological vulnerabilities in isolation.This article offers a cultural–theoretical framework for understanding these developments by examining how platform-based communication environments reshape the conditions of meaning-making and social recognition. Drawing on the concept of Existential Parallelism (EP), the analysis argues that digitally mediated communication intensifies structural dynamics characteristic of late modernity, including the weakening of shared interpretive frameworks and increased pressures of identity construction.Within attention-driven platform economies, emotionally activating content and performative identity signaling are systematically amplified, shaping patterns of visibility, recognition, and belonging. These dynamics contribute to the emergence of curated interpretive micro-worlds in which individuals stabilize identity through selective informational environments while broader symbolic coordination becomes more fragile.By integrating research on attention economies, social comparison, and affective polarization, the article situates digital communication within wider processes of symbolic competition and commodification. It proposes that contemporary communication infrastructures do not simply produce fragmentation but amplify existing tensions between recognition, belonging, and identity formation in digitally networked societies.