IT as Process and Globalization as Outcome

On a sunny midday spring Sunday in 2000, accompanied by a research assistant who spent five years working for a dot-com firm while still attending college in Southern California, I met at a restaurant in downtown Berkeley with a postgraduate engineer and computer programmer who works for a major Silicon Valley telecommunications company. I asked him to tell us what the concept of the digital city evokes for him before we began a focused conversation on his expertise and work practices that would allow me to understand an aspect of the digital infrastructure and transformation of the American metropolis. So, you ask me what I would expect when I hear the title Digital City. I would expect two things immediately. I would expect it to cover the virtual city aspect of things, the virtual community, sort of thing where it is not a physical thing. You are not talking about any real community, but about the digital city. If you can imagine all of these people that are on chat, e-mail, and all these things. For instance, at Yahoo, we are trying to make it a community. You sign up for Yahoo and you get your e-mail, chat, and you can use these games, and calendar. You have this community of people on-line that spans someone in China, the United States, another person in Egypt, or whatever, brought together into this community. That’s one aspect I would think of … sort of this aspect of bringing people together into this digital community as opposed to a real community with neighbors. Another thing that comes to mind is the city type of San Francisco. As San Francisco becomes digital, as things become more and more computerized, what does that do to the city, what does that make it become, what does that do to people in real communities? How do they live and how they deal with life, neighbors, and maybe the interaction of the two? Does having the digital city in the sense of the digital community, does that change people’s expectations of a real city and does that change the way they deal with the real city, their real neighbors, and their real life? For the past three years, it has been the only time where it has been possible to have a lot of friends on-line and never meet them in person. They might not even know where they live or even their real name. It could be Jon@Yahoo. They won’t even know if the real name is Jonathan or if that is just an alias. How do they see their friendships? Do they consider their friends on-line as good as friends as other people? Are their friendships different? I know a lot of people that do chat. They can say things on-line and be a different person off-line. Even down to the fact that you can be three different people with three different names and no one could know that all those aliases are all you. Do people have different friendships on-line, or are they the same? Are they just extending the same sort of things to other places? That’s what comes to mind. That’s kind of a city making things easier to do. You do not have to stand in line at the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles]. You might go into the ability to do things like that on-line and how it makes things easier. (Male engineer working at Yahoo)