Artifacts
Subtitle: an archaeologist's year in Silicon Valley
By: Christine Finn.
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
Subjects: Finn, Christine -- Travel -- California -- Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County); Material culture -- California -- Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County); Technological innovations -- Social aspects -- California -- Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County); Computers -- Social aspects -- California -- Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County); Technology and civilization; Archaeologists -- California -- Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County) -- Biography; Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County, Calif.) -- Civilization -- 20th century; Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County, Calif.) -- Description and travel; Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County, Calif.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
Genres: Biography.
Description: "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 Valley may be driven by technology, but it also encompasses architecture, transportation, food, clothing, entertainment, intercultural exchanges, and rituals.".

"Combining a reporter's instinct for a good interview with traditional archaeological training, Christine Finn brings the perspectives of the past and the future to the story of Silicon Valley's present material culture. She traveled the area in 2000, a period when people's fortunes could change overnight. She describes a computer's rapid trajectory from useful tool to machine to be junked to collector's item.

She explores the sense that whatever one has is instantly superseded by the next new thing - and the effect this has on economic and social values. She tells stories of a place where fruit-pickers now recycle silicon chips 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, reveal themselves in the cultural landscape of the fifteen cities that make up the area known as Silicon Valley."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [217]-223) and index.