Price of everyday life: inflation talk, household anxiety, and economic meaning-making on Indonesian social media

Budhi Santoso

doi:10.67490/ijle.v1i3.1021

Authors

Budhi Santoso Universitas Islam Negeri Raden Fatah Palembang Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67490/ijle.v1i3.1021

Keywords:

digital economic discourse, household anxiety, inflation talk, Indonesia, social media

Abstract

Background: Inflation in Indonesia increasingly appears not only as a macroeconomic indicator but also as an everyday social experience through which households narrate food prices, wages, transport costs, savings, and domestic uncertainty. Objective: This study examines how Indonesian social media users construct inflation as household anxiety and economic meaning-making in public digital discourse. Method: This study employs corpus-assisted discourse analysis, affective appraisal, and narrative attribution on 31 public discourse items consisting of primary social media texts, secondary media materials, and official contextual documents. Results: Inflation talk is dominated by staple-food pressure, price memory, and urban affordability frames, showing that users interpret price movement through concrete household objects rather than technical economic vocabulary. Household anxiety appears through income adequacy, food-security concern, savings erosion, mobility pressure, and moral irritation. Digital meaning-making emerges through practical adjustment, peer advice, blame attribution, spatial comparison, and simplified macroeconomic explanation. Implication: This study demonstrates that online inflation talk functions as an informal arena where households translate economic instability into shared vocabularies of survival, distrust, and practical reasoning. Novelty: This study advances inflation discourse research by shifting focus from institutional policy communication to household-centered digital interpretation in Indonesia.

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