Artifacts : an archaeologist's year in Silicon Valley
Annotation Silicon Valley, a small place with few identifiable geologic or geographic features, has achieved a mythical reputation in a very short time. The modern material culture of the Valleymay be driven by technology, but it also encompasses architecture, transportation, food, clothing, entertainment, intercultural exchanges, and rituals.Combining a reporter's instinct for a goodinterview with traditional archaeological training, Christine Finn brings the perspectives of thepast and the future to the story of Silicon Valley's present material culture. She traveled the areain 2000, a period when people's fortunes could change overnight. She describes a computer's rapidtrajectory from useful tool to machine to be junked to collector's item. She explores the sense thatwhatever one has is instantly superseded by the next new thing -- and the effect this has oneconomic and social values. She tells stories from a place where fruit-pickers now recycle siliconchips and where more money can be made babysitting for post-IPO couples than working in a factory. The ways that people are working and adapting, are becoming wealthy or barely getting by, arevisible in the cultural landscape of the fifteen cities that make up the area called "SiliconValley."
collective biographies
xlix, 244 pages : illustrations, map ; 21 cm
9780262062244, 9780262561549, 9780262272674, 0262062240, 0262561549, 0262272679
46661745
library.ccsu.edu Entire Brian O'Connell Collection