Technology creates efficiency

How does one ensure the smooth integration of home and work, individuality and community, in public life? This question circulates through much of our course. Much of English-Lueck's research indicates that technology serves to blur these apparently contradictory components of public life. English-Lueck quotes a respondent in her research:

There is a very, one could say[,] compelling scenario to develop that work could become a 24 [hour] experience which, I think, would be horrible. But the information technology will allow you to do that . . . You have to separate what I'm going to spend on work and what I'm going to spend on my personal life because lines will blur.

How does this occur? One might recall previous conversations about the machine and the garden in which the power to influence human behaviors is hidden beneath subtle environments that seemingly privilege human will. Like the classic Star Trek episode, "Shore Leave," technological means of surveillance and control reside just under the surface of public life and amusement. However, according to many residents of Silicon Valley, even these metaphors are blurred, so that the machine is the garden. Orchards and farmland are rapidly replaced by "campuses" and "office parks." The turn-of-the-century light tower that once straddled Market Street in downtown San Jose [illustrated by the postcard above] would be an anachronism today not because technology has lost its ability to amaze - but because we so thoroughly live in a maze of technology.

Technology integrates relationships

Many respondents to English-Lueck's research also argue that technology - more than city halls or public squares, offers cohesion to contemporary public life:

In the worst future there would be a hodgepodge of technologies all competing and complexifying the market and myriad separate cultures each with their own conflicting agendas. In the best future you would have a single unified technology and a single unified culture, although the specifics would reflect the cultural background of the interviewee. Harkening back to the melting pot analogy, the new unified techno-being would be a cold fusion of formerly distinct cultures.

The question remains: is this a good thing? Langdon Winner warns of the power of ubiquitous technology to create an electronic panopticon, an "all-seeing-place" in which individuals are continually surveyed:

For today's workers under panoptic scrutiny, the system is, of course, totally opaque. They are allowed to see only what the program allows. Closely watched and clocked, workers within the city of icons may find even fewer chances to express their individuality or participate in decisions than they did in the old-fashioned office or factory. When space is intangible, where do workers organize? (p. 58).

Naturally, many residents and observers of Silicon Valley may disagree. It is possible that computer-mediated relationships create the potential to construct networks of like-minded individuals and groups without the limitations of geography and, with the aid of sophisticated software, even language. Howard Rheingold (1999) proposes that internet communication may indeed enhance the potential for democratic public life. Responding both to recent studies that correlate frequent internet use to social isolation and to Robert Putnam's (1995) influential study of the decline in civic engagement in U.S. society over the past 35 years, Rheingold emphasizes the role of personal and community responsibility in crafting democratic spaces online:

If there are ways of using the Internet to help people grow and flourish instead of shrink and retreat, of building virtual communities where people [deepen] ties to each other's lives, of using the Internet to increase civic involvement in our geographic communities, then it's up to the people who use the Internet to determine whether it is healthy for our heads or our society.

Exploring the role of technology in Silicon Valley - as a tool of efficiency and relationship-building - reveals a fascinating convergence in public life, at least in high-tech communities. Social forces that appear elsewhere to be opposed to one another - leisure and labor, individuality and community - seem to blur in the former "Valley of the Heart's Delight." Shall Silicon Valley continue to pace younger communities seeking high-tech wealth and prosperity? Or, in dystopian contrast, shall it fall prey to warnings made by Joel Garreau and Mike Davis - that public life cannot flourish without physical sites of diversity and democracy?

References