From Ledgers to Logins: How financial language shapes our (digital) reality
Did you know the word "account" increased by 247% in English usage between 1985-2019? According to Google Books Ngram data, this growth wasn't uniform—technical documentation saw a staggering 586% increase, while literary fiction showed only 68% growth. What makes this significant is that most common English nouns remained stable during this period; "account" underwent semantic broadening, expanding from financial contexts to encompass digital identity and platform participation. The data indicates usage has plateaued since 2020 – did it peak? I'm not so sure, but the evidence is inconclusive so far.
Yesterday evening, my TV demanded I update my "account settings" before I could watch anything. Why does managing your streaming account feel exactly like dealing with your bank? Nobody likes dealing with their bank so why did we think that using the same language will make anybody happy?
What fascinates me is not just this semantic shift, but how rarely we question the metaphors that structure our digital lives. In research, we obsess over asking the right questions, yet seldom examine the language we're using to frame those questions. The very word "account" imports an entire financial worldview into our digital interactions – positioning us as customers in a transaction rather than, say, participants in a community.
By 2012, digital identity references had officially overtaken banking as the primary context for "account." When early computer scientists needed a framework for organizing system access, they instinctively borrowed from finance. But what alternative metaphorical frameworks might have emerged? What would our digital experience look like if built on different linguistic foundations?
Being able to afford knowing what you really want – as a person or customer – requires a form of self-reflection that not many can afford themselves. See what I did there? We can't "afford" it. Our language is so thoroughly colonized by economic thinking that even our metaphors for personal growth are financial.
This matters deeply when we make things. The culture embedded in our language shapes what questions we ask and what solutions we imagine possible. When we build digital systems around "accounts," we're not just making a technical choice but perpetuating a specific cultural framing.
These are the patterns my work explores – not just the products we create, but the cultural foundations they're built upon, and the culture we bring to the creation process itself.