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Living with Technology Saturation
The widespread use of information,
communication and entertainment technologies changes how daily life
is experienced and managed. The devices provide the means for
orchestrating tasks and social context and the technology, and the work
in which it is imbedded, render the metaphors by which life is understood.
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WICSV Update
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| in Silicon Valley Update The Work, Identity and Community in Silicon Valley project enters an era of data analysis we want to take this opportunity to thank the participants who spent time with us and shared their thoughts about work, life and Silicon Valley. Here is an update of what we have accomplished and what we have planned.
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The Silicon Valley region is composed of diverse fragments—towns, companies, ethnic communities, social networks—that shift and reform themselves. Workers flow through a mosaic of organizational cultures in their daily lives. Individuals must negotiate this metamorphic social terrain by creating social networks that can sustain them and new metaphors to justify their strategies. Work is the dominant venue for this creativity. In the Silicon Valley technological metaphors evolve into solutions as the local community is “reinvented” to support an “optimal” work environment. Work and non-work time become blurred. Community activity, justified by its value to work, reaches into education, communications, recreation and family. Community becomes transformed into an instrumental force for production. Investigating the nature and impact of this shift in community self-definition is the primary research question. As a bellwether of American high tech
communities, Silicon Valley displays distinctive characteristics. Because
organizations import managerial and professional expertise from abroad
they experience a demographic influx comprised of highly educated, upwardly
mobile elite, largely from Asia. In California, the successive waves
of ethnic, immigrant and refugee populations diversifies the lower echelons
of the community. High tech communities also contain distinctive corporate
cultures that may color the larger region with varied work ethics, models
of interpersonal management and images of mobility and risk. The boundary
of workplace and family blurs as “egalitarian, familial images” of relationships
are shipped into the corporate culture, only to form new corporate notions
of identity and family which trickle back into the home. The density
of technological tools and toys may themselves mediate human relationships.
Finally, just as pagers redefine parents relationships with their teenagers
the information and telecommunications technologies may transform traditional
face-to-face communities as well as virtual ones, redefining identities,
relationships and family communication patterns. Our second research
questions explores constant creation, transformation and erosion of
individual and familial identities that take place within high tech
communities.
Project Methodology and Design The issues we seek to explore are dominated by opinions and assumptions that need to be empirically examined through close inquiry into the lives of everyday people. Those people live their lives in multiple domains and it is futile to understand one domain exclusively. To accommodate these limitations we have constructed a flexible research approach that allows investigators to easily move across domain boundaries. Traditional anthropological ethnographic interviewing, network elicitation and observation are combined with demographic data, analyses of organizational practice and other measures of interaction and identity. In our research in Silicon Valley we cannot view workers in corporations solely as “informants,” subject to our investigations, but as “partners” whose organizations may support the research. Museums and other community organizations become conduits of community research, not just end repositories. This lies at the heart of our collaborative approach which has encompassed Smart Valley, Inc., The Tech Museum of Innovation and the Institute for the Future, as well as corporate partners such as Apple, Adobe and Hewlett-Packard. Three anthropologists, graduate students from various disciplines, and scores of undergraduates have contributed to this research.
Description of the portion of the Project funded by NSF: The portion of the WICSV project was funded by NSF. This funding covered the transcription, encoding and preliminary analysis of the data. The Work Identity and Community in Silicon Valley project, primarily interview based with situational observations, is articulated with a deeply observational study of dual career families in Silicon Valley funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Data from the WICSV project was to be mined to sensitize the researchers to the articulation of work and family and the emic categories imbedded in the work, family and community domains. From August 1998 to February 2000, student assistants and staff transcribed 11,296 pages of taped interviews and observations, some 4 million words. 45,611 segments of discourse/observations were coded. The principal investigators read transcripts as they were being completed and worked with the coded data as it became available, particularly focusing on descriptions of 1) work practice and work relationships, 2) family and friendship network creation, maintenance and erosion and 3) the articulations between work and family activities. Twice a month the Principal Investigators met to discuss the preliminary analysis and its connections to the Sloan funded observational research on work and family.
For more details see
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| The Infomated & Communicated Projects The Infomated household project began when IFTF, a non-profit organization that embraces clients in industry, government and education, noticed a peculiar feature on one of their surveys. People who had five or more consumer information devices (ranging from pagers to computers) had a distinct profile from those who had less. They called this mysterious group infomateds. They conducted a large scale Harris and Associates survey whose questions complemented the ethnographic efforts of our team. Darrah, English-Lueck, and five students developed an ethnographic interview survey that sought to capture the relationships and values that underpinned the infomateds use of the information technologies. We ran 30 interviews on 15 selected households, constructing natural histories of their most precious, least precious and most contested digital devices. This interviews revealed so much data they ultimately drove the analysis of the quantitative surveys—revealing some intriguing patterns. The second project followed closely on the first as our team explored these digital device users in their workspaces in Fortune 1000 companies. In this project the ultimate focus was on the devices and again, in oblique ethnographic fashion, we explored their link to technology by examining how relationships were enacted using these devices. In both cases we employed the ethnographic wisdom that asking for values directly rarely works, instead approaching the topic indirectly by getting thick descriptions, rule and stories. The lessons we learned by examining devices in their “natural settings,” that is, households and workspaces revealed a fascinating juggling act.
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Continuing their successful collaboration with Menlo Park’s Institute for the Future, Chuck Darrah and Jan English-Lueck have been working on a long-term project to explore the nature of global work and family, especially high technology work, in the other “Silicon Places” across the planet. In October, 1998 Chuck went to Bangalore, India and Jan went to Taipei, Taiwan to find out how people there manage their cross-cultural connections at work and home. In January, they both went to Dublin, Ireland and continued to collect interviews. Students in Chuck Darrah’s Ethnographic Methods (Anth149) class are currently interviewing global workers from many parts of the world who have come to Silicon Valley to live and work for a period of time.
Silicon
Work: Tales of Trust from |
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| Last Updated: July 2003 | ||
