Convenient efficiency: A media genealogy of QR codes

Abstract

This article explains the widespread adoption of Quick Response (QR) codes from a media genealogy perspective. Understanding QR codes as more than the materiality of their machinic embodiments and rather as a method of systematically and repeatedly addressing emergent problems, I argue that the operative logic of QR code is that of convenient efficiency. Convenient efficiency captures three dynamics that drive QR codes’ ubiquity: the potentiality of spontaneous system synergies (system/distributed convenience coupled with streamlined efficiency); the autonomy of the subjects involved as part of this cybernetic system (personal convenience coupled with stacked efficiency); and the relative independence of the networks/assemblages that these practices constitute (convenient efficiency). That the convergence between convenience and efficiency as driving forces in contemporary technological culture has origins in the shop floor is consequential to the way motion, time and the body become disciplined—as well as the epistemological practices that cohere around these forces.