Technology, Agency, and Financial Price Data

This chapter establishes the relationship between technology and financial markets, presents the concept of the generator, and applies the concept to a case study of the stock-ticker, the first custom-tailored financial technology. The concept of calculative agency has been introduced to establish technology as a market agent, and it is defined by framing, disentanglement, and performativity. Standardization, which transfers data across contexts and plays an important role in the rationalization of decision making and in the constitution of financial transactions, involves a set of rules, conventions, and tools. Technology is considered as social action with its own temporal structures, and the distinction between its price-recording and the price-transmitting features is explained in detail. The author also discusses the constitution of price data before the ticker, price data boundaries and status groups in financial markets, the ticker as time generator and device for knowledge organization, and the generation of cognitive tools.