The case of the inflationary loyalty points — ClubCard wasn’t Tesco’s first loyalty points system. In 1963, the grocer signed on to a loyalty scheme called Green Shield Stamps. The introduction of these loyalty points was so momentous that thousands descended upon the shops when they were launched, and a dozen people fainted. It was a big deal. …

I’ve received quite a bit of feedback from people who said they enjoyed reading about how loyalty points relate to communities and social tokens. My plan was to dive deeper into loyalty points, following the excellent themes raised in Lana Swartz’s book. …

In the last Pacenotes we dug into the literature around how to design for belongingness in online communities. I thought we would follow the lit trail from the Civic Signals research and go a hop or two further upstream into the work that led to those conclusions in the first…

This edition of Pacenotes will be a deeper dive into some specific parts of the Civic Signals research. In the following editions I will follow the lit trail a little bit to dig into some of the papers referenced in the research to look at some of the mechanics of…

In this edition of Pacenotes, I’ll be diving into some super interesting work done by Civic Signals, a group led by Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud. You might recall Pariser’s name as the author of The Filter Bubble, where he was an early observer of the phenomenon of polarisation on…

The last edition of Pacenotes discussed some points from Lana Swartz’s book New Money. This week I’d like to highlight a few examples from her chapter on loyalty points. Loyalty points are probably the closest analogue social tokens have to existing systems for groups of users or customers. …

The media scholar Lana Swartz (@lanalana) at the University of Virginia has a great new-ish book out called New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. Swartz analyzes money, and more specifically payments, as a form of media, with some really interesting insights and implications for social tokens. For starters, Swartz…

In the last edition of Pacenotes, I went through some of the ideas and data presented in Sarah Thornton’s book, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. In particular, the process of enculturation, which authenticates certain technological forms and technology enabled practices, like DJing and “disc culture”, as opposed to…

Fan studies provides a rich, though sometimes discombobulating, seam of material to mine for the social token researcher. Previously we looked at the decentralised phenomenon of BTS fans, known as ARMY. This worldwide assemblage of people juice BTS rankings, sales, radio rotation and donations to social movements. In this edition…