Fractured spectacle: Contrasting reactions to Itaewon stampede across Korean and English-language networked publics

Late modern society has been conceptualized as a spectacle, a metaphor that brings to light not only its commodification but also the benumbing impact of mass media on the audience’s political agency. This study turns attention to the spectacle in the age of social media. Building on a growing body of research on the spectacle of suffering, we compare reactions to the 2022 Itaewon Halloween stampede, which claimed more than 150 lives, across Korean-language and English-language posts on the social networking platform, X (previously Twitter). Our research draws on two computational techniques, topic modeling and network analysis, to examine the emotive and evaluative character of the discourse as well as its structural features. The analysis reveals significant differences between the two corpora. While the English-language network, in which corporate media accounts are most prominent, dehumanizes the victims and parrots the official version of events, the Korean-language network, driven by ordinary users, evinces empathy and draws attention to administrative failures – serving as a prelude to large-scale protests across South Korea that forced the government to concede its responsibility for the tragedy. We argue that even though the spectacle remains relevant as a concept to understand mediatized public life today, it is not quite as monolithic as it was originally conceptualized. Instead, the logics of social networking have rendered a fractured spectacle, with different networked publics producing different representations of and reactions to public events in the digital attention economy – leading to different political consequences.