Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition - Hardcover

English-Lueck, J.A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1503600238 ISBN 13: 9781503600232

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Since the initial publication of Cultures@SiliconValley fourteen years ago, much has changed in Silicon Valley. The corporate landscape of the Valley has shifted, with tech giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter vying for space with a halo of applications that connect people for work, play, romance, and education. Contingent labor has been catalyzed by ubiquitous access to the Internet on smartphones, enabling ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft and space-sharing apps like Airbnb. Entrepreneurs compete for people's attention and screen time.

Alongside these changes, daily life for all but the highest echelon has been altered by new perceptions of scarcity, risk, and shortage. Established workers and those new to the workforce try to adjust. The second edition of Cultures@SiliconValley brings the story of technological saturation and global cultural diversity in this renowned hub of digital innovation up to the present. In this fully updated edition, J. A. English-Lueck provides readers with a host of new ethnographic stories, documenting the latest expansions of Silicon Valley to San Francisco and beyond. The book explores how changes in technology, especially as mobile phones make the Internet accessible everywhere, impact work, family, and community life. The inhabitants of Silicon Valley illustrate in microcosm the social and cultural identity of the future.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

After Santa Clara county in California was labeled “Silicon Valley” in the 1970s, it attained a mythical quality in the public imagination. Although much of the myth is surely hyperbole, the region has experienced and continues to experience forces that will shape the future elsewhere in the United States and around the world. The paramount producer of the information revolution, Silicon Valley has become the icon for a lifestyle saturated with digital devices.
Whereas most books on the region focus on its entrepreneurial reputation, this book is an anthropological expedition into the everyday lives of people living in and connected to Silicon Valley—software engineers around the water cooler, a mothers’ group at lunch, nannies in the park, rush-hour commuters—to get at the emerging texture of life. A specialized high-tech economy has drawn people from many countries, and the things that make Silicon Valley culture distinctive—technological saturation and cultural complexity—also define an emerging global culture, and in that context it operates as a natural experimental laboratory.
Based on ten years of anthropological research, the book is an ethnographic exploration of the impact of these momentous changes on a single region. Within schools, workplaces, and homes identities emerge, erode, transform, and are recreated to coalesce into a larger community of communities, producing many different choices for its inhabitants. These choices determine how technology is used, work is done, and families are made. People juggle these choices, often informed by the same pragmatic, instrumental reasoning that characterizes high-tech workplaces. Saturated by information technology and struggling to manifest civic life from deeply diverse identity communities, the inhabitants of Silicon Valley illustrate in microcosm the social and cultural identities of the future.

From the Back Cover

“English-Lueck’s fascinating new book, Cultures@Silicon Valley, casts a laserlike anthropological eye on the mores and mannerisms of her homies. . . . English-Lueck and colleagues left the groves of academe and spent years—real quality time—observing “ordinary” people doing mundane things. . . . English-Lueck writes about moms at youth soccer games keeping one eye on the laptop and one on the field, dads who bond at the park by sharing their work histories, families that make a place at the dinner table for the PC, janitors who take high-tech courses to keep up with the custodial equipment innovations.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“While we read about its excesses and shortcomings in newspapers every day, rarely are the factors that distinguish Silicon Valley from the rest of America put in a broader context. In Cultures@SiliconValley, anthropologist J.A. English-Lueck explores the unique set of assumptions taken for granted by engineers and entrepreneurs alike, suggesting how apparent success in the Valley gave way to tangible failure.”—The Examiner

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1503600238
• ISBN 13: 9781503600232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 225