This forum presents the work of a group of cultural anthropologists who are working to understand Silicon Valley, a place that is both blandly familiar and grandly exotic. We study Silicon Valley for a number of reasons. It is the prototypical ``technified community,'' resting on a base of high tech industries ranging from computers to biotechnology. It is a place of great cultural diversity driven by the influx of people from around the country and world. Silicon Valley is a global symbol of and model for at least one high tech future, and it is a mythic territory where bright young lads in a garage can blend innovation and entrepreneurial savvy to create more democratic corporations -- and change the world in the process.
Beneath the hype and images, however, exists a region occupied by real people who struggle to survive the consequences of the Silicon Valley myth. The region is composed of diverse fragments -- towns, companies, ethnic communities, social networks -- that shift and reform themselves. People must negotiate this complex social landscape by creating networks to sustain them and new metaphors to justify their strategies. Identity and work becomes the dominant venue for this creativity, and home and work are integrated -- and separated -- in new ways. Silicon Valley elite use technological metaphors to encourage and direct community action, while less elite inhabitants alternately believe or resist the attempt to invent the 21st Century version of the company town.
This forum will provide a brief introduction to how at least some anthropologists are looking at the region as a cultural phenomenon. Our perspective is based both on our backgrounds as anthropologists, and on fieldwork that we are conducting in the region. Because we are part of the Silicon Valley, our research constantly allows and requires that we reflect on our own lives; your reaction may be similar! But the issues addressed are of broad significance: What will be the relationships between the public and private domains of like? How do we navigate in a world in which we cannot assume that other people share our basic values and assumptions.