Polarization in the Short-Video Era: Attention, Identity, and Everyday Political Talk

Abstract

Short-video platforms have become an important infrastructure of political communication as users increasingly encounter public affairs through rapid, visual, and emotionally charged content. This transformation matters because politics is now experienced less through sustained deliberation and more through fragmented clips, symbolic cues, and routine platform interaction that can intensify social distrust. This article examines how short-video environments reorganize attention, identity performance, and everyday political talk in ways that deepen polarization. The article adopts a qualitative and theory-driven approach grounded in media sociology, digital political communication, and affective polarization research. It draws on contemporary scholarship on platform affordances, short-video culture, political signaling, and algorithmically mediated visibility. Analytical attention is directed to attention infrastructures, memetic compression, identity performance, affective escalation, and relational sorting as interconnected mechanisms shaping political perception. A mechanism-based synthesis is used to clarify how short-video communication transforms disagreement into moralized and socially consequential forms of conflict. Polarization emerges as a sociotechnical condition in which platform design, symbolic communication, and everyday interaction reinforce selective exposure, quick judgment, and political hostility. Short-video politics therefore affects not only formal democratic contestation but also civic trust, social ties, and the emotional structure of public life. The article contributes to the field by offering an integrated sociological framework for understanding how short-video platforms reshape polarization beyond conventional explanations centered only on ideology or elite conflict.