What Diner's Club Card Reveals About the Nature Of Money

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

How's it going, Tracy? I feel like it's been a long time since we've talked.

Tracy Alloway (0:20)

Well, it has been a long time. I went on a lovely vacation for about two weeks.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

It probably doesn't make sense to our listeners because we pre-recorded some, and so they've been coming out every week. But I guess, so this is just me and you talking. It's nice to catch up.

Tracy Alloway (0:34)

Yeah, it's good. And all our listeners should really admire our organizational skills and the skills of our producer as well for enabling the seamless, seamless transition.

Joe Weisenthal (0:44)

Well put. So today, we're gonna go back to one of our favorite topics that we revisit from time to time on this podcast.

And it's not gambling, which we talk about quite a bit, as you know.

Tracy Alloway (0:58)

Is it chess?

Joe Weisenthal (0:59)

No, it's not chess. It's nothing to do with games. It's not about betting on baseball or poker. It's not even about the bond market, which is a common theme. No, we're going to be talking about what money is and trying to come to more understanding about what we actually do when we pay for things and stuff like that in our everyday lives.

That wasn't very articulate.

Tracy Alloway (1:27)

I really enjoyed this topic because it's something that clearly touches everyone's lives to borrow from Oprah, I guess.

I'm a little rusty coming back to this podcast, but it's something that clearly everyone does, right? We all pay for things, we all use cash, we all use credit cards, online bank accounts, branch bank accounts in some ways, and all of that is a big, big thing in our lives and it's something that is also rapidly changing.

Joe Weisenthal (1:57)

It's one of the most important things in our lives and probably one of the least understood to the point where people don't even try to understand it and that's what makes it so fascinating.

And as one of our earlier guests a long time ago noted, usually the people who are most intimately involved with money, economists are the worst actually at defining it. And so I think that's what I'm really excited about today's guest because today we're going to be talking to someone who actually is a professor of media studies, who studies money and so someone who's very, you know, not coming at it from the economics angle, but maybe because of that can actually shed some unusual light on the subject.

Tracy Alloway (2:43)

Oh, well, that sounds really interesting. And I think I know what your first question should be.

Joe Weisenthal (2:47)

Yeah, me too. So, all right, let's bring her in. We're going to be talking to Lana Swartz. She's an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

Lana, thank you very much for joining us.

Lana Swartz (3:09)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:10)

Let's just get in with the first question which Tracy already hinted at, but why is the study of money something that makes sense within the context of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia?

Lana Swartz (3:25)

Well, I think there's two ways to answer that. One is historical and one is present oriented. So historically, if you look at what has counted as money, what we've used to do money, it's always been the kinds of things, the kinds of technologies, the kinds of forms that we have used to do other kinds of communication, other kinds of media. So scholars, communication scholars and historians have described how the printing press was really this important media and communication technology that allowed for the consolidation of the nation state and the economic imaginary, the size of a nation.

And along the same lines is the rise of the newspapers and the rise of the printing press. We have the rise of paper currency.

So what is more media than paper? Of course, paper currency has all of these images and icons of our kind of national imaginaries, what we want to remember historically as the character, the branding, if you will, of our country. And it also kind of created this common economic language, as one of my colleagues, Eric Hellener, who's a Canadian media scholar, has described, for people to speculate. So you knew you were a member of the same nation, the same polity, if you could transact easily using the same currency that everyone recognized as valuable.

So in this way, it was sort of this public infrastructure that lubricated the economy for citizens of a given territory. But then, if you move forward and see that, you know, Western Union and Telegraphy, today we really only think of Telegraphy as something for money transfers. And of course, they don't use Telegraphy anymore, but Western Union, the company. And then looking into the 1970s, 80s, and then into the 90s, we have the very same technology, the same kinds of computers that were used to build what became the internet, used to build the Visa MasterCard network. So the technologies of communication and media and information exchange are the very same technologies of financial exchange and money. And we can see the same thing with cell phones. And, you know, every social media company from Facebook to Google is trying to introduce their own payment systems. So at every step of the way, historically and into the future, we have the stuff of money being the very same as the stuff of media and communication.