New Money
How Payment Became Social Media
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A new vision of money as a communication technology that creates and sustains invisible—often exclusive—communities
One of the basic structures of everyday life, money is at its core a communication media. Payment systems—cash, card, app, or Bitcoin—are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what’s at stake when we pay.
This accessible and insightful analysis comes at a moment of disruption: from “fin†‘tech” startups to cryptocurrencies, a variety of technologies are poised to unseat traditional financial infrastructures. Swartz explains these changes, traces their longer histories, and demonstrates their consequences. She shows just how important these invisible systems are. Getting paid and paying determines whether or not you can put food on the table. The data that payment produces is uniquely revelatory—and newly valuable. New forms of money create new forms of identity, new forms of community, and new forms of power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intriguing if somewhat superficial account, Swartz (coeditor, Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff), a University of Virginia media studies professor, examines the rise of new financial technologies as reflectors of the user's personal taste and values. She surveys a plethora of new technologies, including Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Bitcoin, as well as frequent flyer and consumer rewards programs, and notes that Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz has referenced the coffee chain's 30,000 locations worldwide, early and widespread adoption of mobile payments, and $1.2 billion already loaded onto Starbucks consumer accounts as evidence that his company could create its own currency. Business analysts predict the creation of many such private "lifestyle" currencies in the future, according to Swartz, who theorizes that a plurality of currencies will mean a plurality of identities ("new bodies, new states, new skins") for consumers to choose from. Left unexplored are how such new forms of money would coexist with sovereign currencies, and whether or not their proliferation would complicate the role of central bankers in the vital macroeconomic functions of limiting unemployment and preventing inflation. This eye-opening introduction to digital finance raises more questions than it answers.
