Seeing a new type of economic inequality discourse: inequality as spectacle in the “billionaire space race”

Michael Vaughan and David Schieferdecker

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: When we study political communication about economic inequality, where do we look? Political communication research has mainly focused on “inequality as a debate”: discussion of the distribution of resources over the population, observed via legacy news media, dominated by elites. We argue for greater attention to other types of discourse characterized by emerging media logics like personalization, polycentrism, and hybridity. We analyze the billionaire space race—a 2021 media event in which 3 hyper-wealthy men traveled to space amid a pandemic—using mixed methods on Twitter and news media data. We demonstrate that economic inequality was a salient topic even though the term was hardly mentioned; inequality was problematized through affective evaluations of the super-rich rather than debate about levels. We conceptualize our case as an example of an identifiable type: “economic inequality as spectacle.” We argue that “inequality as spectacle” is critical to contemporary inequality discourse, given interrelated trends driving ambivalent attention to the lives of the super-rich, including the formation of reactive social media publics, extreme wealth concentration, and a broader anti-elitist moment.

Keywords: wealth inequality; elites; digitalization; computational analysis; content analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2025-01-06
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Published in International Journal of Communication, 6, January, 2025, 19, pp. 348 - 369. ISSN: 1932-8036

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