Rich Kids Research Articles

Rich Kids and Fast Cars: Re-aligning Perspectives on Protection and Mental Healthcare of Affluent Children in Conflict with Law

Rich Kids and Fast Cars: Re-aligning Perspectives on Protection and Mental Healthcare of Affluent Children in Conflict with Law

Examining the role of television programmes in legitimising inherited wealth and privilege for the super-rich in a society that values meritocracy

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen the proliferation of television broadcasts that focus on the lavish lifestyles and consumption of “rich kids.” However, flaunting inherited wealth is an accountable activity within UK society that claims to be based on meritocratic values. Whilst wealthy individuals are a source of public spectatorship, they are also attributed with contributing to economic inequality and inhibiting social mobility. This study draws on social psychology to examine media representations of wealthy heirs accounting for their wealth in popular programmes about the “super rich.” Forty-one and a half hours of non-subscription UK television data from 2016 that included the term “super-rich” was analysed. Drawing on Discursive Social Psychology, heirs were found to be managing an ideological dilemma of accounting for their inherited privilege while in a (supposedly) meritocratic environment. Heirs use four interpretative repertoires to negotiate their unmeritocratic position: (1) having a fair go, (2) unintentional privilege, (3) constructing wealth as “family money” and (4) sharing wealth with loved ones. These interpretative repertoires downplay privilege by redefining ownership, highlight any work they do, construct them as aspirational and present them as lacking agency. The presentation of heirs in entertainment documentaries maintains the illusion of meritocratic conditions.

From Globalism to Glocalism: Consumption Patterns of Rich Kids and Its Effects on Other Young People

Consumption patterns in social groups are diversely affected by global and local processes. Using a mixed approach, this study analyses the consumption pattern of three classes of young in Tehran (capital of Iran) including the rich, middle and lower classes. The findings suggest that the self-indulgent lifestyle of rich kids of Tehran is a reproduction of global consumption patterns. The ingress of global patterns and culture into society was also mediated through the rich class, who are inclined to convergence in consumption in the global context. Rich kids act as the reference group for lifestyle among middle- and lower-class youth, who adopt eclectic lifestyles in the local context. Overall, the nature and extent to which rich kids are perceived as a reference group differ between the two classes, with the middle-class youth taking a more realistic, extensive and imitative perspective and the lower class incorporating a more mental, limited, false and damaging mindset.

Rich kids of Europe? Social basis and strategic choices in the climate activism of Fridays for Future

AbstractIn 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg began a school strike that quickly spread across the globe. After a ritual strike every Friday by school pupils to call for urgent action against climate change had gone on for several months, what had become Fridays for Future (FFF) called for various global days of action throughout 2019, bringing millions of people out onto the streets in the largest climate protests in world history. Drawing on unique protest survey data on FFF events across European cities in 2019, this article explores the structural bases of organized collective mobilization for climate justice. Nuancing narratives that focus on either the privileged background of climate justice protesters or the environmentalism of the poor, our results show the heterogeneity of the social composition of the protests, suggesting the need for cross-class alliances for mass mobilizations. Moreover, our analysis reveals that the social background of protesters shaped their attitudes regarding what institutions and approaches can be relied upon to tackle climate and environmental challenges. This suggests an important and under-studied connection between social background and the strategic choices of environmental movements.

Internet theatre and the historical consciousness of the Covid-19 era

ABSTRACT The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and virtuality structured by the materialism of the Internet. Internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a metonym for the transformation of the human subject from corporeal flesh to bio-techno hybrids. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2021) are used as case studies in this article to show how today’s informational environment augments perceptions of the real in performance through the convergence of media formats, including the fleshy human. This analysis is contextualised from the historical perspective of the post-Cold War period when anxieties about cultural homogeneity and assimilation were prominent themes in theatre and performance discourse in the absence of any viable alternative teleology to Western capitalism.

The Rich Kids of Instagram: Luxury Travel, Transport Modes, and Desire

The Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI) portray luxury lifestyles on social media. The potential roles of travel and transport within these online displays of affluence have not yet been examined. This paper’s purpose is to analyse how transport modes and luxury travel are depicted and interrelated through RKOI images. Co-occurrence analyses were conducted using a data set of Instagram posts with RKOI as a hashtag (2012–2018) to visualize the roles of transport modes and luxury travel in RKOI image construction. The findings demonstrate that both energy-intensive transport modes and luxury travel, whether through air/watercraft or luxury cars, play a vital role in signaling RKOI’s self-image on Instagram, with gendered differences. The article contributes an original conceptual model of how RKOI construct their image using transport modes and luxury travel. Implications for the social normalization of carbon-intensive transport choices, coupled with luxury destinations as a backdrop, are discussed.

Rich Kids of Tehran: The Consumption of Consumption on the Internet in Iran.

Web 2.0 technologies and social media have given new dimensions to consumerism. Users, overwhelmed with images of prosperous people in wealthy nations, may fantasize about being in their position. In the last decade, new pages on Instagram have emerged with the hashtag #RichKids. Here, users consume luxurious items and prestigious positions, but vicariously. Borrowing the term “vicarious consumption” from Thorstein Veblen, and slightly modifying it to provide an interpretation of consumers of @richkidsoftehran (RKOT), the current study argues that this and similar pages not only do little to solve the problems of the followers but also are counterproductive, creating feelings of rage and frustration. It is the consumption of someone else’s consumption. Although the human mind can imagine itself in RKOT’s position, followers are also aware at all times that this is somebody else’s pleasure, not theirs. This study suggests that netizens ought to take a media literacy approach to help themselves understand that their attention is a valuable personal and collective asset, and they should defend it against the forces which seek to take advantage of ordinary people’s aspirations.

Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran' and The Believers Are but Brothers - digital lack and excess in a postdigital age

ABSTRACT This article addresses two recent performances by Javaad Alipoor and Kirsty Housley - Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2019) and The Believers are but Brothers (2017). It argues that they represent a fresh, stripped back and interrogative mode of intermedial performance, marking a clear departure from practices that employ the digital as a spectacular scenographic tool - where the visual excesses of large scale mapped and projected images are there for us to enjoy - as well as from sited, active and playful uses of handheld devices and networked engagements in mixed reality performance. Particularly focusing on the use of audience members’ smartphones and platforms such as Whatsapp and Instagram, I contend that the prompting of these types of interactions in a theatre space generates a productive uneasiness at the intersection of human action and digital process. The article explores these qualities of unease and critical positionings that emerge within the contained spaces created in the performances and how they reveal and heighten the dual lack and excess of contemporary digital content and processes in our lives. In exploring these ideas, I make reference to postdigital theories, discourses of intermediality and critical writing around digital computation.

50% Laughter, 50% Despair: A Dialogue with Jarett Kobek

50% Laughter, 50% Despair:A Dialogue with Jarett Kobek Jarett Kobek (bio) and Rita Raley (bio) When JARETT KOBEK says he writes garbage, he is not to be believed. The self-laceration is ubiquitous—"this is a bad novel," the narrator of I Hate the Internet (2016) says in so many words, throughout the text—but it should not be understood as false modesty, an anxious plea for affirmation, or as stylistic affectation. Such pronouncements are instead aspirational. "I try to make everything a little shitty," KOBEK explains in an interview, because, the argument goes, truly holding a mirror up to the surreal horror that is post-9/11 America necessitates a self-conscious abandonment of the figure of the romanticized writer, as well as the aesthetic project of literary realism.1 Writers of "good novels," his narrator protests, have "missed the only important story in American life," "the world of hidden persuaders, of the developing communications landscape"—in other words, the internet.2 It may be that the new Click for larger view View full resolution Jarett Kobek, self-portrait. Image courtesy of the author. [End Page 469] idioms and genres of self-expression and the accelerated temporal rhythms of multichannel communication are ill-suited to the mode of the "good novel." But KOBEK's argument is not about literary form or language, so one cannot point to Flarf, uncreative writing, Alt-Lit, or even Emoji Dick as counterexamples. KOBEK's indictment is more fundamental and his outrage more overtly, unreservedly, political. What US writers in particular have missed, his work suggests, is the extent to which life itself has been altered by an industry that has broken its utopian promise; that captures and capitalizes on every utterance; that rewards extremity, cruelty, and, yes, stupidity—in other words, the internet. It is all very sordid, but it does make for wonderful, albeit tragicomic, satire. Lest it not be clear, I should stress: Kobek is perfectly capable of writing good novels and in fact has done so. ATTA (2011), his fictionalized biography of the hijacker Mohamed Atta, imagines 9/11 as an enactment of Atta's master's thesis, which railed against Western skyscrapers and idealized an "Islamic-Oriental city."3 It is incisive, elegant, and in many ways an emblematic work of academic fictocriticism. He has also written a carefully considered, sympathetic analysis of XXXTentacion, which uses the musician's social media presence to reflect on the question of separating the work and life of an artist. And here too he pursues his critique of the exploitative structure of social media, the coercive force of which is unevenly distributed. "Rich kids don't suffer the same Internet as poor kids," he dryly observes, noting the class markers in many a Twitch streamer's home.4 All of this paves the way for Kobek's summative polemic, Only Americans Burn in Hell (2019), equally well titled and quite rightly described by Alan Moore as a "scabrous portrait of an America lost in its insipid fantastic dreams while it is sliding into an abyss."5 The setup for the book, which is best analogized to a stand-up comedy set, with all of its seemingly digressive refrains, self-mocking confessions, and droll punchline, is this: Celia, the Queen of Fairy Land, goes to Los Angeles with her murderous bodyguard, Rose Byrne, in order to find her daughter. What else do you need from a novel, Reader, except perhaps a broadside against, in no particular order, the US publishing industry, NYU Abu Dhabi, fantasy and superhero films as war pornography, representational [End Page 470] politics and call-out culture, homelessness in America, the endless war in Iraq, and Donald J. Trump as "the natural consequence of an entire society that adopted unending slaughter as its central function"?6 Scabrous it surely is, but it works because it is also sincere. Not content to catalog and lampoon the grotesqueries of our moment, the book enfolds a moral lesson in an elaborate story about gaining access to the pit at a Guns N' Roses concert at Staples Center with a friend dressed as a circus performer: we may all be in fairy land, but...

Benedek TotthDead Heat by Ildiko Noemi Nagy

Cvetka Lipuš is a Slovene from the Austrian state of Carinthia. This is her seventh book of poetry since 1988, and she is the recipient of a number of significant awards in both Austria and neighboring Slovenia; it is high time that her work circulated in the anglosphere. And we are off to a great start in that regard, because this collection has been rendered into luminous, inviting English by Tom Priestly of the University of Alberta; his sophisticated translation, built on intricate diction and topical accuracy, nobly and ably underscores the unifying beauty of Lipuš’s writing. Many of these poems are rigorous in their formulation. They deserve to be closely read, closely heard, as they walk us along the frontier of the unconscious. Indeed, motion is a key feature in most of the individual works. The words and images are in constant movement, not just in the simple sense of journeys but by evocations of rivers , clouds, tsunamis, navigation, orbits, the speed of light, tornadoes, trains, cosmonauts , ladders, breezes, and, yes, deaths. The motion is open-ended: begun, for whatever reason (sometimes dread), but not necessarily completed. Some of the poems take us out of ourselves completely , as when the author refers to being older than herself, getting accustomed to herself, stepping out of her memory, or, in a manner devoid of neither charm nor melancholy, checking the mailbox to see if she is there. Some of the works, such as “The Dream,” “Sleeplessness,” or “Employment,” qualify as surreal or Borgesian; “Open End” contains brilliant existentialist reflections on (auto)biography . Two of the poems stand out to this reviewer for the beauty of their representations of multigenerational families and midlife happiness : “Perpetuum Mobile” and “Dreams Limited.” Lipuš’s work is intense and philosophically inclined. It aims not at pyrotechnics or confession , or at history or politics, or at morale or morality. But it feeds the brain, in every positive sense, as well as fills the heart; this is because its ends and means are, arguably , so enmeshed and coordinated. This is poetry that is powerful and erudite (in the right, procedural and not encyclopedic way) and quiet, even patient: arguably what we are hearing is supreme, supple artistic confidence, and the silence arises from our reading, thinking, and rereading. John K. Cox North Dakota State University Benedek Totth Dead Heat Trans. Ildiko Noemi Nagy. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2019. 251 pages. THE CHARACTERS IN Dead Heat, the debut novel by Hungarian author Benedek Totth, are absolute monsters. They are cruel in word and deed, and when they are not being cruel, they are themselves the recipients of cruelty. The novel is a rat king of banal meanness rendered in stark, simple sentences that begin to take on a de Sadeian “listicle” quality that overwhelms and affects and just as quickly disappears. We follow members of an elite high school swim team. They’re rich kids, most of them, and if they’re not rich, their friend and leader Ducky is. They smoke weed and drink and drive and run over homeless people. They feel a little guilty but mostly they just keep going. They urinate on sauna rocks and molest girls through their clothes and then toss them off to the side. This continues for several hundred pages. If it sounds like I’m moralizing, well, I might be. I personally enjoy mean art, art that pulls no punches, that is visceral and angry. I also like books that contain ideas, innovation, something new. If it’s got to be ugly on the way to being brilliant, I am all for it. But what exactly is this novel saying? That the youth of today are disaffected, violent , angry, horny, sad? I have the internet. I can go to Twitter any time I open up my phone and see that. While reading a book like this, I’m left wondering, “Okay . . . so?” We’ve had books like this for almost a hundred years now, books precisely like this, and I’m sure the general gist can be traced back further. Books in Review 104 WLT SPRING 2020 For all my complaining, however, the book has great moments. Take this passage...

Poor Little Rich Kids? The Role of Nature versus Nurture in Wealth and Other Economic Outcomes and Behaviours

Abstract Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of Swedish adoptees merged with similar information for their biological and adoptive parents. Comparing the relationship between the wealth of adopted and biological parents and that of the adopted child, we find that, even prior to any inheritance, there is a substantial role for environment and a much smaller role for pre-birth factors and we find little evidence that nature/nurture interactions are important. When bequests are taken into account, the role of adoptive parental wealth becomes much stronger. Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth. We further build on the existing literature by providing a more comprehensive view of the role of nature and nurture on intergenerational mobility, looking at a wide range of different outcomes using a common sample and method. We find that environmental influences are relatively more important for wealth-related variables such as savings and investment decisions than for human capital. We conclude by studying consumption as an overall measure of welfare and find that, like wealth, it is more determined by environment than by biology.

Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.

The Mediation of Luxury Brands in Digital Storytelling

This paper considers the mediation of luxury fashion brands in the digital storytelling of the social media account named The Rich Kids of Instagram. Since 2012, Instagram users have been encouraged to use the hashtag #rkoi so photos of a lavish lifestyle can be collected together. The conspicuous consumption of these affluent young people from different countries also became Channel 4’s six-episode reality TV show Rich Kids of Instagram. The Instagram accounts and the TV show displaying well-known luxury fashion pieces, splendid cars and private jets are the object of this study.The motivation for this investigation comes from the need to reevaluate the idea of luxury and its dissemination in contemporary digital media. As is frequently exposed in social media, and in this particular case on Instagram, we aim to examine the outcome of this display. We intend to argue that the represented world on Instagram and the subsequent TV show distorts the expected or the lived experience of luxury as something distinctive and unique, and turns it into a kitsch object. Drawing on Baudrillard’s approach to mass-media culture (1998), we view kitsch as a category that is not to be confused with the real object (in this respect, the luxury one), but understood as a “pseudo-object” that represents an “aesthetics of simulation” of the original.

Poor little rich kids

This article analyses the photographic representations of the daughters and stepdaughters of Tijuana politician and businessman Jorge Hank Rhon. His wife Maria is the subject of Yvonne Venegas’s 20...

Participatory Modeling and Simulation with the GAMA Platform

In recent years, agent-based simulation has become an important tool to study complex systems. However, the models produced are rarely used for decision-making support because stakeholders are often not involved in the modeling and simulation processes. Indeed, while several tools dedicated to participatory modeling and simulation exist, these are limited to the design of simple KISS models, thus reducing their po-tential impact. In this article, we present the new participatory tools integrated within the GAMA modeling and simulation platform. These tools, which take advantage of the GAMA platform with respect to the definition of rich KIDS models, allow the modelers to build models graphically and develop distributed serious games easily. Several application examples illustrate their use and potential.

The Gun That Won the West

The Gun That Won the West Siân Griffiths (bio) Winchester Let's not pretend I was an unbiased researcher. I had intentions. I had best laid my plans. I set out to write an essay about guns and guilt and the female body. That's the story I'd first encountered all those years ago while watching a random episode of A&E's America's Castles. The legend lodged in me, building a little home in which to live, paying little board. It went like this: A widow and heiress, consumed by grief at the loss of her husband and infant daughter, consults a Boston medium. He identifies the source of her bad luck: she's haunted by those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that won the West, the sale of which had made her fortune. She sought escape in motion, moving from Connecticut to California. She bought a house and hired laborers to construct elaborate traps and tricks to fool the phantoms who pursued her. The house, an icon of Victorian womanhood, became the receptacle and representation of all her torment. She constantly devised new wings, custom ordered glass, designed everything from stairwells to faucets. Building continued twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year until her death. In effect, she had scapegoated herself, shouldering her country's shame like a heavy woolen mantle. She fled directly into her own madness and transmuted guilt into architecture. How could I not be fascinated? Ghostlike, she's haunted me all these years, until finally, I began in earnest to research and write. Her story was perfect as a plum, weighty and dripping with juice. The problem, I would learn, is that the story wasn't true. 1988: Gun #1 I was a fifteen-year-old white girl living in the booming Los Angeles suburbs, amid the palm trees and orange groves of the Inland Empire. My [End Page 56] school, Riverside Poly High, was called the ''rich kids' school,'' though as one of our teachers snidely reminded us, if any of us were really rich, we would have been in private school. Her point was moot. We were generally doing well enough. Many of us had backyard pools. A lucky few got cars for their birthdays, including our future valedictorian, who had scored a white bmw complete with sun roof. I had moved from small-town Ohio a few years earlier and lacked the fashion sense to know Gucci from Jordache. Even so, I felt safe if not accepted. If there's one thing rich kids' schools specialize in, it's cultivating outsiders. Looking back, it's easy to recognize the kid who sat behind me in US History as just another outcast. I didn't recognize him as one then only because he wasn't on my radar at all. He was quiet. I don't remember even being aware of him behind me each day until the day he nudged me before class, opening his school bag and inviting me to look inside. I remember the backpack as an oily blue, the gun itself as chrome and shining. I don't remember him saying anything. I don't remember speaking either. The situation, more than anything, confused me. Why the need to show the gun? Why to me? In those pre-Columbine years, I didn't exactly feel threatened. If there was a right way to respond, I still don't know what it was. States The gun debate in this country basically boils down into two factions holding a disparate set of beliefs. Pro-Gun: I love guns and everyone should have one. Anti-Gun: I don't like guns and so no one should have one. The Pro-Gun faction believes the world will be safer only when everyone is armed. The Anti-Gun faction suggests we melt the guns. Neither stance is productive. Neither wants to be persuaded. Winchester The widow may have moved west for any number of reasons. She and her late husband had traveled to the Bay Area years before, and she had loved her time there. More recently, her brother-in-law had taken a job...

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

The Go-Between by Veronica Chambers

Reviewed by: The Go-Between by Veronica Chambers Karen Coats Chambers, Veronica The Go-Between. Delacorte, 2017 [208p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-101-93095-3 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-101-93096-0 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Camilla del Valle is not as comfortable with her role as one of the #RKOMC (Rich Kids of Mexico City) as her friends are, and she's completely over it when one of her supposed friends posts a picture of her wildly famous telenovela star mother's anxiety meds for the world to see. When her mom is cast as a maid about to turn entrepreneur in an American TV show, Cammi decides to take advantage of her stateside anonymity by letting the girls at her new school in LA believe her mother is actually a maid and that Cammi's on scholarship. Her new friends Tiggy and Willow are casually racist about Mexicans, but Cammi enjoys her secret too much to let a little thing like that bother her. When Milly, a girl whose life actually mirrors the one Cammi is playing at, reveals Cammi's secret, things blow up, and Cammi has to figure out a way to apologize and make things right. Despite the spectacularly bad taste of her deception, Cammi manages to remain a sympathetic character, mostly because she is able to continually justify her reasons and expose her doubts, and because Tiggy and Willow are so heedlessly condescending. Milly, then, emerges as a hero, forcing her to tell the truth and then punishing her just long enough before forgiving her. The girls have the requisite scene where unacknowledged privilege is called out and apologies are made, followed by the equally familiar closure of a community fundraising street fair where harmony is restored. While such scenes are swiftly becoming clichés in feel-good diverse literature, the lead-up to them is original, and the characters here are all well drawn and appealing. Collections in need of a different kind of immigration story will want to check this out. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Ambivalent Attitude of Young People in China Toward Rich Kids: Evidence from Behavioral Indices

A social phenomenon of great interest in China is that of young people who have rich parents, commonly referred to as “rich kids.” These rich kids are both liked and disliked by other young people, leading to contradictions in the behavior of their peers toward the rich kids. We conducted 2 studies to examine the attitude that young people hold toward rich kids from an ambivalent theory perspective. In Study 1, we used a free-thinking task and found that participants were ambivalent, associating both good and bad things with the target phrase “rich kids.” In Study 2, we presented participants with a scenario. Participants showed a more negative evaluation of, and more ambivalent emotions toward, the target they were supposed to meet when they were told that the target was a rich kid. These results showed that the participants' attitudinal ambivalence manifested in their emotion but not in their cognitive evaluation.

Ambivalent attitude of young people in China toward rich kids: Evidence from behavioral indices

A social phenomenon of great interest in China is that of young people who have parents, commonly referred to as rich These kids are both liked and disliked by other young people, leading to contradictions in the behavior of their peers toward the kids. We conducted 2 studies to examine the attitude that young people hold toward kids from an ambivalent theory perspective. In Study 1, we used a free-thinking task and found that participants were ambivalent, associating both good and bad things with the target phrase rich In Study 2, we presented participants with a scenario. Participants showed a more negative evaluation of, and more ambivalent emotions toward, the target they were supposed to meet when they were told that the target was a kid. These results showed that the participants' attitudinal ambivalence manifested in their emotion but not in their cognitive evaluation.