University of Siegen
Fellow at CAIS from April to September 2020
Photo: Fabian Stürtz
How would you like to pay? And how do we exchange value differently if we do it with digital media? My book project is concerned both with the history and theory of digital payments. It connects the history of credit card usage with more recent developments, like mobile payment, apps and blockchain-based currencies.
My approach is interdisciplinary, and situated in between media studies, social/practice theory, Science and Technology Studies, and the History of Computing. Historiographically, I aim at a different, praxeological understanding of digital infrastructures and their everyday economic impact.
Digital societies rely on deep financialization, and constantly appropriate the Internet for it. This is why I investigate monetary social media via their modes of accounting and distributed bookkeeping. Think of this as an inquiry into digital monetary mediation and ‘multiplicities of money’. It is going to intertwine mediation and practice, thus telling a story that begins with plastic cards and ends with datafied money, apps, and digital wallets.
