Barcode

(Paperback)

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Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Though they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed, few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, their ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of their success. After all, barcodes have remained mostly unchanged (except for a few exceptions like QR Codes) for the last 50 years, and yet billions of barcodes are still scanned each day. But behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important and interesting history. And at times they have been the focus of controversy, the subject of protests by labor unions and consumer groups, and a stand-in for capitalism and surveillance. Barcodes bridge the gap between physical objects and digital databases and are paving the way for the contemporary Internet of Things. Barcode tells the story of the barcodes complicated history and examines how an object so crucial to so many parts of our lives has become more ignored and more ordinary the more it spreads throughout the world. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Author Bio

Jordan Frith is Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, Clemson University, USA. He is the author of three books, including A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification (2019) and Smartphones as Locative Media (2015).