Illustration by Ian Moore.
Around the time I began writing this piece, a photograph shared by Kylie Jenner popped up on the ‘Explore’ page of my Instagram. In it, she proudly sits atop a black Ferrari, parked in a driveway alongside her other five luxury cars: two Range Rovers, a Porsche, a Lamborghini and a Rolls Royce.
The image has, so far, racked up 8.5 million likes from an audience who have grown more than used to watching the 22-year-old billionaire flaunt her decadent lifestyle from the rolling hills of Calabasas, Los Angeles County, California. Thanks to its famous residents, this particular neighbourhood has become synonymous with wealth and celebrity, but just weeks ago, shocking statistics rippled through both the local and international press, shedding light on the grim reality of LA’s wider housing crisis, stating that homelessness in the county had increased by an alarming 12 percent in the last year. Zoom out a little, and the broader picture is similarly bleak. Last year, the US Census Bureau announced that California, alongside Florida and Louisiana, had the highest rate of poverty in the US.
These numbers aren’t easy to consider or unpack inside the social media universe where we spend so much of our time. But when we urgently need to address the topic of inequality, how do our habits online, both in sharing and consumption, contribute to an already twisted poverty narrative? It’s perhaps a little unrealistic to expect a personality like Kylie Jenner to be shedding light on issues such as these in her Instagram captions, but staring at such a vulgar picture and considering the ways it revels in its own blinkeredness leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Recently, our obsession with materialism has become almost farcical. We’ve succumbed so deeply to the smoke and mirrors of social media that the performance of wealth has turned into a strange, dark art form. The ‘Falling Stars’ challenge, which swept across social media in China last year, is the epitome of this. To take part, individuals are photographed face down on the floor, surrounded by their most expensive possessions. The images feel almost haunted, as though the bodies are cadavers at a crime scene, about to be outlined.
In my mind, it’s no coincidence that these online trends have surfaced during a time when the mainstream media landscape is still clinging to the idea of wealth being a mark of hard work, and poverty being the result of laziness. Publications on both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of twisting the poverty narrative, buying into and perpetuating falsehoods about what having money means and says about us as people. We’re drowning in misinformation; headlines are telling us that welfare systems make people lazy, and that Kylie Jenner is ‘self-made’. I’m not sure which bare-faced lie I find more troubling.
'Falling Stars Challenge'. Images via Instagram @ec24m and @classysavant.
Lately I’ve been dissecting the framing of poverty within the media much more than I ever have done in the past. This is due, in part, to some work I’ve been doing alongside a social affairs journalist named Mary O’Hara. For the past 18 months, she’s dedicated her life to an investigation into the ways that those living in poverty, particularly younger people, can be impacted by their perceived status in society. Her findings will be published in a book next year, aptly titled The Shame Game. I assisted Mary in the launch of an initiative she spearheaded around the book called Project Twist-It, which seeks to challenge the immeasurably damaging and reductive rhetoric that echoes through both the UK and the US, implying that financial hardship is the result of poor life decisions, as opposed to government policy and systemic economic inequality.
This ideology isn’t new. Dr Heejung Chung, a sociologist at the University of Kent, has been a strong force within Mary’s project, and, in an interview for it, commented on the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan to dismantle the welfare system in the Eighties.
“The idea was that, as a citizen, you don’t have a right to a decent living; you have to show that you’re going to be working for it,” she noted. “They developed this term, ‘the welfare queen’. The welfare queen was a fantasy, it doesn’t actually exist – it was a black single mom, with lots of children, scrounging off the state, wearing a mink coat, with a fancy car, but then using her food stamps to feed her children. That doesn’t really exist in the US, but they used that image to make sure that the voters were okay with the state dismantling benefits and services at that time, to those really small, very deprived groups.”
"We must question why we worship figures who hold such influence and power when they reinforce damaging stereotypes about the rich and poor."
When examining the hangover this has caused, one of the themes that has come up for us, time and time again, is the influence that certain imagery can have on young people in the digital age. While issues surrounding the internet’s influence on our body image have long been the subject of numerous studies and think pieces, this wave of visuals online celebrating unabashed consumerism, in which so many of us are complicit, is seldom talked about. When writing her book, Mary came upon some particularly worrying research relating to this which we later discussed.
“An academic was testing the ways that people’s attitudes towards poor people are affected by being shown images of wealth or conspicuous consumption,” Mary told me. To those not familiar with the term, ‘conspicuous consumption’ is the spending of money on expensive items and services that are intended to be visible and on full display, giving very deliberate outward signals about a person’s wealth. The idea is that conspicuous consumption is based more on indicating a person’s status than actually meeting the needs of the consumer.
“He found that the test subjects that were exposed to the most visual examples of this – for instance, shows like Keeping Up With The Kardashians – were the ones who were most likely to have negative attitudes and views towards poorer people,” she added. It’s a sobering revelation, and one I believe could have the power to inspire some real change in people’s attitudes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying or celebrating one’s wealth, but we must question why we worship figures who hold such influence and power when they reinforce damaging stereotypes about the rich and poor. We’re too early on in this era of digital overshare to understand the real, long-term repercussions of our online behaviour, but this much is overwhelmingly clear: the exposure to certain imagery can drastically impact our attitudes about ourselves and others. At a time where the issue of poverty is so misunderstood and misrepresented, we have a responsibility to make efforts to improve the state of the conversation. Step one could be as easy as rethinking your own content. What I’m saying is, if you have six sports cars, I hereby congratulate you. Just hold the photo.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 63, out now!