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Venmo: Understanding Mobile Payments as Social Media

Published: 18 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Payment infrastructures are going through rapid change with the rise of next generation mobile networks and smartphone ownership. From mobile wallets to rideshare apps, social payments allow users to split receipts with friends, charge exes for breakup expenses, or troll celebrities. New layers of data, sociality, and markets are being created and influenced by expanding economic imaginaries, regulations, and business models leveraging these new infrastructures. In this paper we discuss how mobile payment systems have become social media. After discussing the recent history of mobile payments innovation---SMS, mobile wallets, delivery and ridesharing apps--- we examine Venmo, a social payments platform that allows users to broadcast transactions to a social activity stream or public transaction feed. Our findings detail how transaction feeds of mobile payments support social practices, communication, and commerce with mobile devices and wireless networks. We present findings from a case study on Venmo to develop some implications for the design, study, and impact of mobile payment infrastructures as social media.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SMSociety '18: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society
July 2018
405 pages
ISBN:9781450363341
DOI:10.1145/3217804
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Copenhagen Business School

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Publication History

Published: 18 July 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Venmo
  2. mobile payments
  3. social mediafication
  4. social payments
  5. transactions

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SMSociety '18

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Exploring Redesigning Digital P2P Payments to Facilitate Social Connections: A Participatory Design ApproachExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651095(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Ebbs and Flows of E-Commerce and M-Commerce in Fashion Business: Digital Markets and Mobility2023 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Knowledge Economy (ICCIKE)10.1109/ICCIKE58312.2023.10131724(197-202)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2023
  • (2022)Making Digital Money “Work” for Low-Income UsersResearch Anthology on Microfinance Services and Roles in Social Progress10.4018/978-1-6684-7552-2.ch013(232-250)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2022
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  • (2022)niDts: A New Generation Intelligent Data Trading System2022 IEEE 7th International Conference on Smart Cloud (SmartCloud)10.1109/SmartCloud55982.2022.00030(151-156)Online publication date: Oct-2022
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