Josh Lauer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3946099 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Josh Lauer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Josh |
| FAMILY NAME | Lauer |
| SIGNATURE | LAUER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New Hampshire |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Economy of Promises
Visualizing Black Telephone Users
This study considers the broad implications of white technological modernity as a mode of symbolic and systemic exclusion. The visual absence of Black telephone users in mass-market advertising-and the struggle to make them visible-underscores the exclusionary power of technological whiteness and its lasting effects on conceptions of Black technology users, communities, and innovation. In the first half of the twentieth century, American Telephon…
Surveillance Capitalism in America
Paid
Sarah E. Igo. The Known Citizen
Few contemporary topics are as white hot as the fate of privacy. Scarcely a day passes without news of purloined data, menacing algorithms, and personal scandals gone viral. It is hard not to feel that access to information about us is palpably different now. Our lives are increasingly connected, tracked, and observed, leaving vanishingly little of what we do to go unrecorded. This is both a blessing and a curse. One need only look to Facebook to…
Creditworthy
In Creditworthy , Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from from an industry that relied on personal knowledge to the modern consumer data industry. He highlights the role that commercial surveillance has played in monitoring Americans' economic lives. p.p1
All the Facts
In All the Facts, Cortada seeks to enlarge our thinking about information and its role in the broad sweep of American history. In this ambitious project, Cortada tracks the growth and cumulative effects of information in business and industry, government and education, and work and home life throughout a period of 150 years. He treats each of these domains in turn, using World War II as a chronological fulcrum. The narrative is encyclopedic. Stud…
Surveillance history and the history of new media
New media are often addressed within the growing field of surveillance studies, but technologies predating the late twentieth century are rarely considered. This essay challenges conventional histories of modern surveillance by highlighting the cultural impact of three ‘old’ new media: photography, the phonograph, and the telephone. Drawing upon the work of historian Carlo Ginzburg (1990) , I argue that new media produce new evidence and that lat…
In hock
The Good Consumer
The Good Consumer offers a historical account of consumer credit reporting in the United States, from its nineteenth-century antecedents in commercial credit reporting through its professionalization and transformation into a key communication infrastructure during the first half of the twentieth century. While describing the technical and institutional development of the modern credit bureau, The Good Consumer draws special attention to one of t…
Money as Mass Communication
This study offers a historical overview of U.S. paper money before and after its nationalization in 1861, drawing attention to its function as a medium of mass communication. Building upon recent scholarship concerning the social construction of money and national currencies, it is argued that U.S. currency is legitimated through visual strategies of rationalization and mystification, whereby the contractual obligations of the state are merged wi…
From Rumor to Written Record
From Rumor to Written RecordCredit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America Josh Lauer (bio) A thousand folios include a page or two or more about you and your affairs, without your knowledge or your consent. Go where you may to purchase goods, a character has preceded you, either for your benefit or your destruction. —Hunt's Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review (New York), 1853 The textualizing of bodi…
Traces of the Real
During the early nineteenth century a popular obsession with autograph collecting swept through the United States. Among such “autographomaniacs”, handwritten signatures belonging to the signers of the Declaration of Independence—and collections bringing together the signatures of all 56—soon emerged as the most rarified. The intersection of autograph collecting and the Declaration of Independence provides fertile terrain for exploring the perfor…
Service des Antiquites de l'Egypte. Fouilles a Saqqarah. La Pyramide a Degres. Tome IV. Inscriptions gravees sur les vases. 1er fascicule
From Rumor to Written Record
From Rumor to Written RecordCredit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America Josh Lauer (bio) A thousand folios include a page or two or more about you and your affairs, without your knowledge or your consent. Go where you may to purchase goods, a character has preceded you, either for your benefit or your destruction. —Hunt's Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review (New York), 1853 The textualizing of bodi…
Surveillance history and the history of new media
New media are often addressed within the growing field of surveillance studies, but technologies predating the late twentieth century are rarely considered. This essay challenges conventional histories of modern surveillance by highlighting the cultural impact of three ‘old’ new media: photography, the phonograph, and the telephone. Drawing upon the work of historian Carlo Ginzburg (1990) , I argue that new media produce new evidence and that lat…
Traces of the Real
During the early nineteenth century a popular obsession with autograph collecting swept through the United States. Among such “autographomaniacs”, handwritten signatures belonging to the signers of the Declaration of Independence—and collections bringing together the signatures of all 56—soon emerged as the most rarified. The intersection of autograph collecting and the Declaration of Independence provides fertile terrain for exploring the perfor…
The Good Consumer
The Good Consumer offers a historical account of consumer credit reporting in the United States, from its nineteenth-century antecedents in commercial credit reporting through its professionalization and transformation into a key communication infrastructure during the first half of the twentieth century. While describing the technical and institutional development of the modern credit bureau, The Good Consumer draws special attention to one of t…
Paid
Service des Antiquites de l'Egypte. Fouilles a Saqqarah. La Pyramide a Degres. Tome IV. Inscriptions gravees sur les vases. 1er fascicule
Traces of the Real
During the early nineteenth century a popular obsession with autograph collecting swept through the United States. Among such “autographomaniacs”, handwritten signatures belonging to the signers of the Declaration of Independence—and collections bringing together the signatures of all 56—soon emerged as the most rarified. The intersection of autograph collecting and the Declaration of Independence provides fertile terrain for exploring the perfor…
Money as Mass Communication
This study offers a historical overview of U.S. paper money before and after its nationalization in 1861, drawing attention to its function as a medium of mass communication. Building upon recent scholarship concerning the social construction of money and national currencies, it is argued that U.S. currency is legitimated through visual strategies of rationalization and mystification, whereby the contractual obligations of the state are merged wi…
From Rumor to Written Record
From Rumor to Written RecordCredit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America Josh Lauer (bio) A thousand folios include a page or two or more about you and your affairs, without your knowledge or your consent. Go where you may to purchase goods, a character has preceded you, either for your benefit or your destruction. —Hunt's Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review (New York), 1853 The textualizing of bodi…
The Good Consumer
The Good Consumer offers a historical account of consumer credit reporting in the United States, from its nineteenth-century antecedents in commercial credit reporting through its professionalization and transformation into a key communication infrastructure during the first half of the twentieth century. While describing the technical and institutional development of the modern credit bureau, The Good Consumer draws special attention to one of t…
Surveillance history and the history of new media
New media are often addressed within the growing field of surveillance studies, but technologies predating the late twentieth century are rarely considered. This essay challenges conventional histories of modern surveillance by highlighting the cultural impact of three ‘old’ new media: photography, the phonograph, and the telephone. Drawing upon the work of historian Carlo Ginzburg (1990) , I argue that new media produce new evidence and that lat…
In hock
Creditworthy
In Creditworthy , Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from from an industry that relied on personal knowledge to the modern consumer data industry. He highlights the role that commercial surveillance has played in monitoring Americans' economic lives. p.p1
All the Facts
In All the Facts, Cortada seeks to enlarge our thinking about information and its role in the broad sweep of American history. In this ambitious project, Cortada tracks the growth and cumulative effects of information in business and industry, government and education, and work and home life throughout a period of 150 years. He treats each of these domains in turn, using World War II as a chronological fulcrum. The narrative is encyclopedic. Stud…
Paid
Sarah E. Igo. The Known Citizen
Few contemporary topics are as white hot as the fate of privacy. Scarcely a day passes without news of purloined data, menacing algorithms, and personal scandals gone viral. It is hard not to feel that access to information about us is palpably different now. Our lives are increasingly connected, tracked, and observed, leaving vanishingly little of what we do to go unrecorded. This is both a blessing and a curse. One need only look to Facebook to…
Surveillance Capitalism in America
Visualizing Black Telephone Users
This study considers the broad implications of white technological modernity as a mode of symbolic and systemic exclusion. The visual absence of Black telephone users in mass-market advertising-and the struggle to make them visible-underscores the exclusionary power of technological whiteness and its lasting effects on conceptions of Black technology users, communities, and innovation. In the first half of the twentieth century, American Telephon…
The Economy of Promises
Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Business (6 works) · History (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · History (3 works)