Inhabiting Technology: The Global Lifeform of Financial Markets

The paper submits that the notion of technology as an external artifact or infrastructure carrying information flows distracts from the world-constitutive role of a particular component of this technology, the screen, and `appresentational' work of traders and a secondary information supply economy that create this world.

Abstract

This paper focuses on institutional currency transactions as a global lifeform that inhabits technology during waking hours, is distributed across the three major time zones, and is nonetheless centered in and on itself - the lifeform constituted by the respective markets and participants in them. We argue that distribution and centering are not at odds with each other in the lifeform of these markets; that notions of interactions and networks embracing all social domains give short shrift to the actual realization of the networks - as centered post-network spheres at odds with the idea of distantiated units or nodes connected only by business linkages and social relationships. The paper also submits that the notion of technology as an external artifact or infrastructure carrying information flows distracts from the world-constitutive role of a particular component of this technology, the screen, and `appresentational' work of traders and a secondary information supply economy that create this world.