Josh Lauer

Creditworthy (eBook, ePUB)

A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life-yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict our riskiness as borrowers and to judge our trustworthiness and value in a broad array of contexts, from insurance and marketing to employment and housing.

In Creditworthy, the first comprehensive history of this crucial American institution, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from its nineteenth-century origins to the rise of the modern consumer data industry. By revealing the sophistication of early credit reporting networks, Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played-ahead of state surveillance systems-in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person's trustworthiness. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reports-and, later, credit ratings and credit scores-credit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned with-and determines-our social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. Juli 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780231544627
• Artikelnr.: 48815567

Autorenporträt

Josh Lauer is an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire. His historical studies of communication technology, surveillance, and financial culture have appeared in Technology and Culture, New Media & Society, and several edited collections.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "A Bureau for the Promotion of Honesty": The Birth of Systematic Credit
Surveillance
2. Coming to Terms with Credit: The Nineteenth- Century Origins of Consumer
Credit Surveillance
3. Credit Workers Unite: Professionalization and the Rise of a National
Credit Infrastructure
4. Running the Credit Gantlet: Extracting, Ordering, and Communicating
Consumer Information
5. "You Are Judged by Your Credit": Teaching and Targeting the Consumer
6. "File Clerk's Paradise": Postwar Credit Reporting on the Eve of
Automation
7. Encoding the Consumer: The Computerization of Credit Reporting and
Credit Scoring
8. Database Panic: Computerized Credit Surveillance and Its Discontents
9. From Debts to Data: Credit Bureaus in the New Information Economy
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index