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by Christine A. Finn

Author:	Christine A. Finn
Subcategory:	Americas
Language:	English
Publisher:	The MIT Press; First Edition edition (November 1, 2001)
Pages:	288 pages
Category:	History
Rating:	4.2
Other formats:	lrf lrf rtf mbr

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Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-223) and index. Print version record. Silicon Valley, a small place with few identifiable geologic or geographic features, has achieved a mythical reputation in a very short time

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-223) and index. 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

Oxford scholar Christine A. Finn spent 2000 in San Jose and its surrounding valley, exploring the personal and material culture of the area.

Oxford scholar Christine A. Though she's no techie herself, she has an uncanny knack for meeting the right people at the right time to get the information she needs to drive her story onward.

That is what Christine Finn delivers in Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley. It is hardly a new thing for journalists to write about Silicon Valley. If the writer is also an Oxford archaeologist, however, then we dare hope for some fresh insights.

That is what Christine Finn delivers in Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley It is hardly a new thing for journalists to write about Silicon Valley. That is what Christine Finn delivers in Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley. Finn's surface collections range from random encounters with strangers on public transportation to the objects of daily life that surround us. Painstakingly, she goes through the stratigraphy of Silicon Valley in the year 2000 - home to cherry orchards, PCs, and finally, the dotcom boom and bust.

An archaeologist explores the material culture of Silicon Valley Über den Autor (2002).

An archaeologist explores the material culture of Silicon Valley. 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. ber den Autor (2002).

Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2001. How we measure 'reads'. It will show how psychologists are using the Internet to examine the interactions between people and. Do you want to read the rest of this article?

Start by marking Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year In Silicon Valley as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read.

Start by marking Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year In Silicon Valley as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. Silicon Valley, a small place with few identifiable geologic or geographic features, has achieved a mythical reputation in a very short time

An archaeologist explores the material culture of Silicon Valley.

Artifacts - TV Unwanted visible effects in the picture created by disturbances in the transmission or image processing, such as edge crawl or hanging dots in analog pictures, or pixelation in digital picture. udio and video glossary

In this talk, she covers what has - and hasn't - changed in the 15 years since her experiences.

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 from 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, are visible in the cultural landscape of the fifteen cities that make up the area called "Silicon Valley."

Comments:

Bort

This was the 2nd of 7 books assigned as reading in an Art History course on artifacts and images. This book is difficult to read at first as the author seems to be randomly meandering through Silicon Valley with no purpose and no method. However, after reviewing her journey at the end of the book, I appreciate the way that the author doesn't do the work for the reader -- she spells nothing out and let's the reader draw his or her own connections. It is an interesting snapshot of life in 1999-2001 in SiVa. Her writing style is unique and clever, though it requires attention and thought from the reader.

Ginaun

This is not the best book for insights about the Valley. As the other reviewers suggest, this book has a bit of a split personality. On the one hand, one has a stream of observational anecdotes about the Valley. All of the usual cliches are here: Fry's, Buck's Diner, the cherry stands, the 101 traffic jams. These read like someone is trying their hand at writing a confessional ethnographic tale, but without a theoretical argument to provide a central structure. On the other hand, one has a stream of stories about computer-as-artifact -- tales about the collectors, like Nathan Myhrvold, and the people who recycle computers, and so on. One gets the feeling that the author set out to write a book about the latter, found it a bit thin, and the editor suggested fleshing it out with some bubble-era backdrop.

Reemiel

So you think you've heard it all when it comes to the Valley, right? Well check this one out. With a fresh view and a scientist's eye, Christine Finn gives us new insight into a subject that has been done before. Frankly, I was sceptical, but I also had a minimum of six hours to wait at SFO (due to fog there and snow in Chicago). The author covers the valley like nobody I have ever read. Underlying a roaming set of essays is an almost palpable enthusiasm. And there is a romantic slant (in the classic sense) - she sees the valley as what it is as well as what it means to society. I recommend it.

Cildorais

This book takes a look at the other side of the Silicon Valley: the side removed from the glitz and glamour of the Silicon Valley (or at least what it had during the writing of the book).
Other reviewers wanted more coverage of local companies. For that, they should turn to the dozens of business publications that already cover that information, or the dozens of books that chronicle the history of the Valley and its various star companies.
This book was written to help outsiders understand the reality of the Silicon Valley and, having been written from the perspective of an outsider, finds significant details that insiders either simply take for granted or just don't notice.
It describes the social foundations upon which the Silicon Valley was built and upon which it currently rests, and uses that information to try to explain how the Valley of Hearts Delight was tranformed. In this regard, the book truly is an archaeological treatise, but written in a friendly and readable style that allows the reader to experience the scene firsthand.

Centrizius

I have to agree with the reader from Woodside, CA. This book is an author's vacation documented with brief historical and computer tech stories. The Title, "Artifacts", does not reflect what the book's content is! It is confusing reading and very hard to follow. Dates, times and places are mixed up, depending on whenever the author remembered a fact or event, jotted it down, and then flips back to another event months after. Silicon Valley and its high tech companies, were not sought after depicting what our high tech companies here have provided, historically, for our world. From an archaeology standpoint, there must have been dozens of companies willing to impart knowledge and "artifacts" to the author, if the author's mind was actually on really gathering pertinent information. I agree, the author had a wonderful vacation here in the Silicon Valley and got to write out her personal travels as she thought they were. There are too many side stories here, including irrelevant cities, places and events written about that clearly have nothing to do with artifacts, the Silicon Valley, or Archaeology.

Matty

I had high expectations for this book, however I was severely disappointed. The book makes claims at being some sort of archaeologist's study, but it reads like a badly written vacation journal written by an easily impressed child. Finn locks onto the most trivial aspects of Silicon Valley and Internet culture and romanticizes them in a way that only someone who doesn't understand them would.

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