Analyzing the Spiritual Rhetoric of Kickstarter

Abstract

This article considers the rhetoric of Kickstarter, a popular crowd-funding website. Using a modified “spiritual quest” theoretical framework, the project examines public statements and interviews from the Kickstarter co-founders, language from the site's “about” pages, and several specific Kickstarter projects. The article finds a certain spiritual rhetoric present on the website, a claim supported by evidence from three crowd-funding case studies.