A bunch of my friends from high school back in Kansas were getting together for a birthday at a hometown bar a little while back and I, now a New Yorker, couldn’t be there. So I told one of my buddies to buy everyone a round and Venmo me for whatever it cost.
His response: “What’s Venmo?”
It was one of about a billion times life has told me that you can’t go home again, but this story would come as no surprise to Lana Swartz, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. She’s the author of the book “New Money: How Payment Became Social Media,” which goes into detail explaining how payment apps are more than tools.
In short: Payment signals affiliation. Swartz calls payment groupings “transactional communities,” and every credit card or national currency represents one. As Swartz writes in her book, “Venmo is not a wallet, it’s a conversation.”
I’ve…
