How Payment Became Social Media
Interview with Lana Swartz about her book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. Discusses money as a medium, highlighting how payment infrastructures shape human life and social relations. Explores money through a communication scholar’s lens, focusing on its material apparatus and how platforms like social media harness money’s sociality. Delves into “transactional politics” – who controls payment networks and how traffic flows – and “transactional publics”, where identity and affiliation are expressed through payment forms. Covers risk models, including chargebacks and the exclusion of risky transactions, and the current resurgence of diverse “money cultures” among youth, including memes and scams.
