Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Creditworthy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://mypages.unh.edu/jlauer
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:C
https://cola.unh.edu/faculty-member/josh-lauer
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017018402 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017018402 |
| HEADING: | Lauer, Josh (Professor of communication) |
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| 001 | 10415022 |
| 005 | 20170331110219.0 |
| 008 | 170331n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017018402 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Lauer, Josh |c (Professor of communication) |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Creditworthy, 2017: |b eCIP t.p. (Josh Lauer) data view screen (PhD, UPenn; assistant professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, teaching classes in Surveillance Media, Critical Approaches to New Media, and Social Communication; has previously taught at The University of Pennsylvania; in 2010, his dissertation won the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History at the Business History Conference) |
PERSONAL
Male
EDUCATION:Indiana University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 1992; University of Pittsburgh, M.L.I.S., 1997; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., 2005, Ph.D., 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of New Hampshire, associate professor. Previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania.
WRITINGS
Has published articles in Technology & Culture, New Media & Society, and Enterprise & Society and has contributed chapters to collections, including The Rise of Marketing and Market Research, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, and The Emergence of Routines: Entrepreneurship, Organization, and Business History, Oxford University Press, 2017.
SIDELIGHTS
Josh Lauer is associate professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, teaching classes in media studies and social communication. His research focuses on the history of communication technology, surveillance, and financial culture. Lauer earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation won the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History at the Business History Conference. He has published articles in journals and contributed chapters to books in his fields. Lauer released his first book, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, in 2017.
In Creditworthy, Lauer delves into the history of credit reporting in America, beginning with the infamous Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that produced a recession lasting well into the 1840s. Businesses and banks failed, and thousands of people were thrown out of work. Unemployment rose as high as 25 percent in areas of the United States, but no part of the country was entirely spared. Lewis Tappan and his brother Arthur saw their silk trade business in New York City wiped out in the panic, partly as the result of having extended credit to customers. In 1841 Lewis formed the Mercantile Agency, a precursor to today’s credit-reporting agencies, as a way to assess customers’ creditworthiness. The business boomed, and he soon opened branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Lauer follows the history through to the formation of the leading credit bureaus Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. These powerful corporations track consumers’ spending habits and other financial information, storing vast archives of personal data.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that the “technological sophistication and scope” of credit agencies’ information gathering has grown exponentially. In this light, Lauer’s “top-down economic history is a thorough, enlightening, and long-overdue contribution.” A correspondent at UNH Today called Creditworthy a “rigorous look at the intersection between creditworthiness and other measures of citizens’ ‘worth’” that is especially resonant in light of the Equifax security breach. Online at We Make Money Not Art, a critic noted Lauer’s attention to “how U.S. citizens became objects of intensive surveillance.” Specifically, the correspondent remarked: “He investigates how financial identity became a key marker of our personal trustworthiness and how increasingly centralised and invasive systems for monitoring an individual’s behaviour and credits enabled the ascent of consumer capitalism in the U.S.” In tracing the history, Lauer offers intriguing stories. Credit agencies even gathered tidbits from newspapers and court documents concerning bankruptcies, divorces, and lawsuits. The data was so extensive that the FBI and police departments would visit credit agencies to peruse the files to aid their own investigations. The reviewer at We Make Money Not Art concluded: Creditworthy “is impeccably researched and makes for a compelling read.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, p. 49.
ONLINE
Josh Lauer Website, https://mypages.unh.edu/jlauer/bio (February 8, 2018).
UNH Today, https://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/ (November 28, 2017), review of Creditworthy.
University of New Hampshire Website, https://cola.unh.edu (February 8, 2018), author faculty profile.
We Make Money Not Art, http://we-make-money-not-art.com (August 28, 2017), review of Creditworthy.
bio >
research.
Media history & theory, communication technology, consumer & financial culture, surveillance.
education.
Ph.D., 2008 / M.A., 2005
University of Pennsylvania
Annenberg School for Communication
M.L.I.S., 1997
University of Pittsburgh
School of Computing & Information
B.A. (History), 1992
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Josh Lauer
Education
B.A., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992
M.L.I.S., University of Pittsburgh, 1997
M.A., University of Pennsylvania, 2005
Ph.D., ibid., 2008
Courses Taught
CMN 519, Advertising as Social Communication
CMN 696, Seminar/History of Surveillance Media
CMN 772, Seminar/Critical Approaches to New Media
Specialties
media history and theory, communication technology, consumer and financial
culture, surveillance
Website
Josh Lauer
Books
Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America
by Josh Lauer
Associate Professor of Communication
josh.lauer@unh.edu
Phone:
(603) 862-3037
106A Horton Social Science Center
20 Academic Way
Department(s):
Communication
Program(s)
American Studies Minor
Josh Lauer is an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire. His research, which addresses the history of communication technology, surveillance, and financial culture, has appeared in Technology & Culture, New Media & Society, Enterprise & Society, and several edited collections, including The Rise of Marketing and Market Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and The Emergence of Routines (Oxford, 2017). He is the author of Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (Columbia, 2017).
Creditworthy: A History of Consumer
Surveillance and Financial Identity in
America
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p49. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America Josh Lauer. Columbia Univ., $35 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-231-16808-3
Mass surveillance of the American public has grown in technological sophistication and scope, but it isn't a new phenomenon, and it's being driven by capitalist enterprise rather than the government, argues Lauer, a professor of media studies, in this fascinating study of the credit- rating industry's central role in creating the "modern surveillance society." The story reaches back to the "market revolution" of the mid-19th century, when entrepreneur Lewis Tappan, spurred by the financial panic of 1837, successfully launched the first credit-reporting enterprise. Lauer follows this history forward through major developments, including the creation of easy consumer credit, the rise of credit scoring, and the onset of big data. Throughout, he carefully maps the necessity for evaluating creditworthiness in an impersonal modern market (and for carefully modulating "the treadmill of debt" in a debt-strapped U.S.) onto cultural shifts--not least the construction of "financial identity" as a facet of a person's full identity, and even a way of gauging a person's moral worth. This story of mass surveillance is unavoidably lopsided, Lauer acknowledges, since the perspectives of consumers (especially before the dawn of consumer advocacy) remain largely out of reach of the historian. Nevertheless, Lauer's top-down economic history is a thorough, enlightening, and long-overdue contribution to the field. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America."
Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 49. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
/A492435662/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=11286297. Accessed 23 Jan. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435662
2 of 2 1/23/18, 9:57 PM
Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, by Josh Lauer.
On amazon USA and UK.
Publisher Columbia University Press writes: The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information about millions of Americans. 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.
Creditworthy opens up in 1913 when oil magnate John D. Rockefeller is denied access to credit in a Cleveland department store. The clerk, who didn’t trust the appearance of his customer, insisted on calling the credit department before authorizing Rockefeller’s purchases. The story shows that at the time already, even one of the richest men in the world, could not escape the gaze of a surveillance apparatus that will remain under-studied for decades to come.
The book ends 100 years later when his great-grandson Senator John (Jay) D. Rockefeller IV initiates a senate investigation into the business practices of the U.S.’ leading data brokers. The results were divulged a few months after Snowden’s NSA revelations. Talking about privacy, the senator said:
What has been missing from this conversation so far is the role that private companies play in collecting and analyzing our personal information. A group of companies known collectively as ‘data brokers’ are gathering massive amounts of data about our personal lives and selling this information to marketers. We don’t hear a lot about the private-sector data broker industry, but it is playing a large and growing role in our lives.
Let me provide a little perspective. In the year 2012, which you will recall was last year, the data broker industry generated $156 billion in revenues–that is more than twice the size of the entire intelligence budget of the United States Government–all generated by the effort to learn about and sell the details about our private lives. Whether we know it or like it or not, makes no difference.
In this book, professor of media studies Josh Lauer describes how U.S. citizens became objects of intensive surveillance. He investigates how financial identity became a key marker of our personal trustworthiness and how increasingly centralised and invasive systems for monitoring an individual’s behaviour and credits enabled the ascent of consumer capitalism in the U.S.
Photograph of the Vegas Credit Bureau parade entry, Las Vegas, circa late 1920s to early 1930s
Many of us think that modern surveillance appeared after 9/11 but its history actually started in the late 19th century when a disembodied doppelganger of the American consumer started materializing inside the files of retail credit departments and local credit bureaus.
The credit reporting industry was an omnivorous collector of personal data. It cultivated trusted informants, connected with hospital and utility companies, placed phone calls to employers, landlords and neighbours in order to amass as much information as possible about American individuals. Many credit departments and bureaus even maintained separate ‘watchdog’ cabinets where they stored all sorts of information that may affect an individual’s ability to pay: divorces, lawsuits, bankruptcies or accounts of immoral behaviour gleaned from papers court and newspapers clippings, etc. The data gathered was so extensive that in the early 1960s, FBI agents, treasury men and the NYPD visited their offices when they needed to fill in gaps in their dossier.
The credit surveillance industry not only quantified the value of citizens, it also functioned as a disciplinary machine, attempting to control their behaviour, shaming them into paying back what they owed and enforcing the doctrine that a person who abused his or her credit must should be shunned from business and society. To the point that, over time, an individual’s financial identity became an integral dimension of their personal identity.
The telautograph. Image: redorbit
Trustworthy explores a very American phenomenon. We do have credit surveillance systems in Europe too but they are probably not as sophisticated as the ones described in the book (note to self: please investigate the European situation.) I’d definitely recommend this book to U.S. readers. It is impeccably researched and makes for a compelling read. I particularly enjoyed the parts describing the array of human and mechanical techniques employed to extract and manage credit information. From the personal interviews that subjected consumers to intrusive scrutiny to the new technologies that enabled the collection and archiving of data. That’s where i learned about the existence of the telautograph, a precursor to the modern fax machine that was developed to transmit drawings to a stationary sheet of paper. It was used in credit bureau, banks and doctors for sending signatures over long distances.
The Rockdale Reporter and Messenger (Rockdale, Tex.), Vol. 82, No. 34, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 9, 1954 Page: 6 of 20
Credit surveillance systems placed individuals at the center of an invasive information and communication network. Its complexity, its reach and the impact it had on society was (and is still) alarming. Yet, most American consumers have long remained unaware of the private surveillance system that facilitated their credit purchases. This lack of knowledge and control is something that most of us -U.S. citizen or not- have often deplored since Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA mass surveillance infrastructure.
Posted in book reviews, money, privacy, sousveillance. Bookmark the permalink.
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Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America
Creditworthy book cover
Josh Lauer, Columbia University Press, July 2017
Billed as the first comprehensive history of the American institution of credit reporting, associate professor of media studies Lauer’s “Creditworthy” sheds light on the rise of the modern consumer data industry and its central role in creating the “modern surveillance society.” Lauer traces the path from the financial panic of 1837, which prompted entrepreneur Lewis Tappan to launch the first credit-reporting company, to the emergence of credit bureaus Experian, Equifax and TransUnion as three of the most powerful institutions in modern life, tracking our movements, spending behavior and financial status. It’s a rigorous look at the intersection between creditworthiness and other measures of citizens’ “worth” that takes on even greater resonance following the massive data security breach announced by Equifax in September.
Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2017
Daniel Solove Daniel Solove @danielsolove Founder of TeachPrivacy January 2, 2018
Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America
From Rowena Olegario (University of Oxford): “Consumer credit reporting is ubiquitous, but its pioneering role in the surveillance of consumers has been poorly understood―until now. Josh Lauer has dug deep into the historical sources and marshaled his findings into a rich and cohesive narrative that encompasses business dynamics, social norms, technology, and regulation. This book will become the indispensable source on the history of both consumer credit reporting and the surveillance society.”