Venmo, a money-transfer app with over 40 million users, allows users to send friends any amount of money, by just typing in their friend’s name, the amount, and a quick message. The ease with which this app allows users to pay back friends, to the penny, and the information it retains about these payments, is an example of how ICTs are changing our reality into an infosphere.
Philosopher Luciano Floridi believes that with this change comes the “gradual erasure of informational friction”. Some examples he provides of the erosion of informational friction, or “how difficult it may be to let some information flow from sender to receiver”, are how the ease of emailing allows for an abundance of spam emails, and how the ability to measure very small amounts allows for micrometering.
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| A venmo payment to my friend for a shared pizza and uber |
Before Venmo, when paying for drinks with friends you might throw a friend some cash, or promise to buy the next round. Even if you paid a friend back with cash, you were never expected to make exact change because no one wants to carry change. Now that we have Venmo, I commonly receive charges and payments after a dinner with friends to the exact cent that was on the receipt. Because the burden of carrying change has been eliminated, we have lost the right to ignore these nickels and dimes that we owe our friends.
Finally, Venmo shows us how money is becoming increasingly digital. When you can pay your friends back with a click of a button, there's no need to carry cash. As Floridi says, "money may as well just be a pile of digits." So why are we wasting our time sending meaningless cents back and forth with our friends?
I really enjoyed your article Annabel. I also have a rather unique perspective on this subject as I do not have Venmo. I first tried to set up an account last year and for whatever reason my bank wouldn't allow it. There have been numerous times just in the last few months where I have tried to pay back a friend with cash instead of Venmo, only for them not to have any cash whatsoever. The informational friction you talk about has therefore been very real for me. Overall you did a great job interweaving your topic and discussion of the class text.
ReplyDeleteThis was a great article outlining what has now become such a regular part of most of our daily lives. Personally, I use Venmo as a means to pay my landlord my rent every month, and I haven't realized how easy it has made it until now. Rather than having to remember to pay the rent, risking it being overdue, I get a notification from Venmo letting me know that my landlord is asking for my rent. I enjoyed the way that you used the ideas of Floridi as the basis for your article and used Venmo to outline his ideologies in a way that ties together efficiently. The only suggestion I might have, if anything, is to make the conclusion to your article sum up what you discussed a little bit more effective in the sense there should be something summing up what you discussed. Otherwise, this blog post was great!
ReplyDeleteThis is a super interesting read, and something I've definitely thought about a lot. It's kind of weird because when I venmo request, I'll usually round to the nearest dollar, but most of my friends will ask for the exact amount. One thing I think would be super interesting to add is the public information about your transactions venmo makes available. I myself have my transactions on private, but many many people make theirs public. It's almost like a form of social media, and I think a lot of people don't even realize how much information about themselves they're giving away by making their profiles public. Why should anyone know who you're paying money to and why? Moreover, this public information has caused friction in my friendships because people have seen each other venmoing each other for drinks on nights they weren't invited out to. Would be interesting to see the social aspects of this tied in.
ReplyDeleteGreat job on your post. You did a fantastic job tying together your ideas on a very widely used app to one of the readings, and that helped with the understanding of both. This made me think about one of my most frequently used apps in a way that I haven't thought of before. Great post!
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