A Summary of “Retail Credit and the mass media” by John Arena

Introduction:

• By retail credit I mean both the idea of acquiring goods on the promise to pay and the conventions used in these transactions, including credit reporting.
• Although credit reporting arrived well after quantification had been established in many spheres of human activity, it marks the historical moment when individuals were quantified as consumers, an identity they exercised daily
• Credit appeared to submit traditional virtues such as character, reputation and trustworthiness to quantification and, hence, authentication. In the process it threw into doubt previous knowledges about social identity, and also diminished the prerogative of the gentry in certain economic contexts; ‘character’ could be had by anyone who maintained a good credit record.
• Second, credit reporting institutionalized a deeply embedded system for monitoring the economic behaviour of the new middle class by the business elite. The implications of this surveillance grated against the democratic vision of the decent man.
• The paradoxical forces of retail credit were picked up and amplified by the popular literature of the period. Thus mass circulation magazines offered stories about how retail credit would freee individuals to pursue material comforts and also of how credit reporting could be used to identify and detain societal misfits and troublemakers
• Popular media framed the issue of credit by drawing upon existing discourses about ethos and trust. By using familiar rhetorics to explain credit’s social effects, mass magazines generally assured readers that credit information would not restructure relationships or uncover new truths, but that it would reinforce existing relationships and certify established truths using more efficient, ‘modern’ techniques.
• Headlines declared that credit ‘worked’ because the vast majority of Americans were as honest as the day was long. These reassurances helped consumers overcome their reluctance, rooted in strong norms of privacy and propriety, to reveal themselves to strangers. Surveillance cannot harm you if you have nothing to hide. Rather, surveillnce is beneficial because it disciplines the deviant others.

Credit and Commerce

• Retail credit began to spread in the last quarter of the 19^th century but did not become a significant part of the US economy until the early 20^th century.

The Spread of Credit Reporting

• With better information, some credit failures might be avoided

Credit and Character

• A rhetoric of ethos played a critical role in making the idea of retail credit acceptable to a culture that for centuries had resisted the notion of debt as inconvenient and possibly immortal.
• The view that credit was the path to social ruin maintained currency well into the 20^th century.
• The average individual could not control his/her desired under the spell of the new consumerism.
• Most people who receive loans use them to alleviate the short-term ‘embarrassment’ or ‘inconvenience’ of their debts, but are incapable of using credit to improve their long-term prospects.
• Credit verified a man’s ability to eep his promises and served as a public sign of rectitude.
• Retail credit seemed to bring new groups of people, among them clers and mechanics’ wives, into contact with a vast array of consumer goods and the possibilities of ‘lifestyle’.
• Prominent among the social groups who seemed liberated by retail credit were women. Credit appeared to release wives from the fiscal authority of their husbands. But women were traditionally considered individuals of weak character, and therefore likely to be poor credit risks.

Credit and Trust

• Mass media stories about credit reporting often stressed the speed, reach, and efficiency with which credit information could be exchanged among stores; the system was unbeatable.
• By paying this price in humilation and hard work, the young man proved his character and earned the right to return to the society of decent, honest Americans. Thus by depicting individuals who did have something to fear from the credit authorities as either criminals or fols, popular discourse helped consumers to rationalized continual monitoring of their behaviour.

Conclusion

• The discourse about retail credit suggets how popular culture tried to come to terms with the transition toward using beureaucratically processed information in everyday transactions.
• Credit not only set the stage for broadcasting, modern advertising and marketing, but it was a highly salient event. It was, in fact,, noticed and commented upon as an imitation of a more general transition to a society organized around information.
• Popular discourse did much to apologize for the evolving credit economy. It converted credit from a source of shame to a source of pride.
• It suggested that surveillance of retail credit transactions was necessary, proper and non-threatening. In many cases, it assumed that credit information would reinforce, rather than undermine, inherited assumptions about class and gender.