Thinking of Money as Media

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 tells us that money forms have been so stable they have become almost invisible to us in the fabric of daily life. This invisibility has led to certain received wisdoms about what money is and how it works. “That’s how we know an infrastructure is working well: as long as it’s not broken, we don’t need to understand how it works,” she writes.

But that invisibility is receding. Payments and money forms are increasingly being drawn into the light to be examined anew. This is partly due to the technologies underpinnig money — fintech and, yes, cryptocurrencies being among them—and partly because of the changing ways people are relating to each other, and therefore using money, in general. Swartz writes:

“Money has come to be seen as newly unstable, newly open to reinterpretation. Change the money, change the world.”

So what does money and payment have to do with media? Swartz starts with communications. Is communications to be conceived of as “transmission,” and reducible to a mathematical equation, as Claude Shannon and other cyberneticists believed? Or is communications a type of “ritual’, in which society is “maintained” over time, as James Carey theorised?

Tying communication to media is the example of the newspaper. The transmission view says newspapers are just a vessel that allow knowledge and facts about the world to flow from writer to reader. The ritual view says it’s more like “attending mass” where nothing new is learned, but instead a view of the world is “portrayed and confirmed”. The ritual view is useful, Carey says, because it exposes the “actual social process” that generates a common culture.

How then does money communicate? Swartz talks of “monetary media”, which are designed in specific ways to convey things. Currency notes issued by governments are imprinted with the motifs of the nation-state; what countries decide to put on their bills can cause a surprising amount of commotion, as when Hamilton was to be replaced by an image of a woman in 2015 on the $10 bill.

But monetary media can be difficult to conceive of in the age of the digital. What is monetary media without the colourful pieces of paper, the ornate coins, or even the signed cheques? Drawing on Bruno Latour’s idea that technology is “society made durable”, we are offered the notion that technology is “communication made durable”.

What does this mean? Instead of the notion that money has now dematerialised into the internet, Swartz draws on Jane Bennett’s notion that non-human things have a type of “vital” energy that she also called “thing-power” (!). As Swartz writes:

But money is also a thing, a processual thing, as the philosopher Jane Bennett describes, a “vital” thing that has the capacity to act in the world. Like other media technologies, it has materiality, and that materiality isn’t threatened by digitalization; rather, it becomes newly material: wire and ether, servers and spectrum.

The emphasis above is mine.

So if money is media, what is the world view offered by this particular medium? Swartz says it shows us a world of transactional communities. “Communication through payment knits us together in a shared economic world,” she writes.

If we think of transactional communities that are mediated by money, then nation-state money is a form of mass media. And the world we find ourselves increasingly existing in, where multiple money forms compete with one another, might be thought of as monetary social media.

The monetary social media world features a proliferation of money forms—not an inevitable “progression” from one form to another. As an aside, it’s tempting to think of Bitcoin as attempting to replace the US dollar, when in fact it will become one of a spectrum of monies that people use in different places. Quoting the sociologist Viviana Zelitzer, “not all dollars are equal”, meaning that even with dollars in cash form, certain pots of money are used in certain places. Swartz reminds us that the story of payments technologies is “one of addition, not progression”.

With that context for Swartz’s lens on money, we can dive in to some specific historical examples from the world of airline loyalty points, truckers’ loyalty points (!), and the notion of the pleasures of belonging to a transactional community—and how that ties in to social tokens—in the next edition of Pacenotes.