My section of this seminar, the effects of technology on family and community, can only be understood in the details of daily life. Technology is binding the world of work and the world of home in ways that redefine what is means to be in each. Some changes are dramatic, others are subtle, but the changes are experienced in the mundane activities of everyday life. To begin this presentation I will tell you a story. This story may not reflect your own lives, but I imagine some details will have a familiar ring to them. 

Meanwhile, his administrative assistant, Sharon, complains that her work load is overwhelming, even to the point where she is expected to move furniture and take out trash. She is expected to learn new programs and upgrades on her own time. Both John and Sharon now take work and worry home. Sharon checks her E-mail and voicemail in the predawn hours before her children wake to prepare for any tasks that may need to be addressed immediately. She carries a pager and a cell phone so that she can stay in contact with her teenaged children after they come home from school. All of them feel much safer for the presence of these devices. They can now stay out longer and be more independent since they are “in contact.” The only time they have been physically together in several weeks is for the anthropologist’s visit to their home for an interview.

Please note that I am not separating information technologies from the institutions that act as conduits for the entrance of those devices into the home. Technology is not context free. Devices brought home from work organizations and schools are accompanied by styles of use and assumed purposes that follow that fax or that Mac into the household. As the boundaries and distinctions blur, we abandoned the idea of sharply separating the domains but instead we traced the flow of technology through peoples lives. It is in the context of this research that I comment on family, community and technology. 

Technology and Family

As mentioned earlier, one of the most strikingly obvious impacts of information technology is the shift in the work-home relationship. We encountered people that said they never took work home, yet the computer had its own room and engineering magazines littered every flat surface. We had to question our assumption that we knew what “work” was. Work was not a single coherent entity, but a collection of different things. People talked of their “work”—ongoing career preparation, finances, parenting. But they distinguished that from their “work-work,” that is, paid work for a particular organization. A large proportion of supposedly free time was spent thinking about “work-work” while in the shower, eating, or driving. As is discussed elsewhere in this seminar, information technologies have been instrumental in redefining the scope of work. 

We asked people what made them a family? Repeatedly the answer was “we do things together.” To these interviewees, the family is not a natural unit that simply exists, but one defined by action. Families watch TV, camp, travel, eat and talk together. The devices that facilitate that action or talk—phones, networked computers, pagers, answering machines—take on a serious purpose for these people. Paging your children to let them know you are concerned that they arrived home safely from school demonstrates parental responsibility. Sharing an evening of movies or technology talk provides an opportunity for doing something together. 

The interactions between information saturated work and networked families are governed by complex rules. As one interviewee noted: 

People also use technology to subvert old roles. One septuagenarian viewed her skill with multiple programs and Internet environments as a sign that she was “empowered” and distinct from more Luddite age-mates. Another aging mother found her role as family center being eroded by her children’s constant E-mail contact. She was now superfluous as the siblings talked directly to each other and not through her. With information devices distant kin can interact more often than immediate family. Parental and gender roles can be both controlled and challenged using the devices. Rules are created to control family roles: “You must wear your pager,” “You must carry your cell phone,” “You must not use the computer during dinner.” These rules are subject to resistance. Exploring the nature of that defiance would reveal much about the workings of family and technology. 

Technology and Community

The high technology industry has also added a global dimension to the workings of community. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Central Californian economy revolved around fruit orchards, worked by an immigrant population that hailed from Portugal, Italy, Japan, China and Western Europe. Contemporary Silicon Valley high tech employs a culturally diverse work force. For example at Sun Microsystems a single thirty-five person work team might be comprised of engineers from Bangladesh, Canada, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and the United States. This region has a complex pattern of immigration, spanning the last century, made more intricate by the influx of “new immigrants,” largely Asian, educated and functionally transnational. This makes any discussion of technology and family, or technology and community more complex. People from around the world are bringing different ideas of what constitutes family, work, and community. Devices do different things to different types of families. In our ethnographic study of Infomated household the same devices might have strikingly different impacts in different types of families. Common use of VCRs, karaoke systems and telecommunications devices pulled together already close Vietnamese families while allowing other kinds of families to fly farther and farther apart. In one Hispanic family each new information technology was placed in a carefully orchestrated system of devices that encouraged tightly-knit extended family and community interactions. The same devices—camcorders, computers, home entertainment systems—fragmented other families into smaller and smaller interest groups. In one Chinese family, an adult son was brought into parental orbit in order to teach his mother new computer skills. In another family, those same computer skills might place the adult child firmly in a corporate world beyond the reach of family as his life is consumed by work. The role of culturally generated family obligations and expectations on differential device uses begs to be researched. 

Just as technology has changed the way people talk about family issues, technology saturation has also influenced the way Silicon Valley folk talk about their community. Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a community partnership between government and business responded to the early nineties’ recession by proposing that the region boldly “reinvent” itself. Using the language of engineering, entrepreneurship and design, community issues—such as housing, transportation, education and recreation—are recast as “value-added” factors to be used to recruit new businesses and workers. These instrumental features can be improved, preferably by adding more technology. 

One of the most striking examples of this perspective came from the Smart Valley Initiative within Joint Ventures. Smart Valley is an organization that began during the economic downturn of 1992, implementing, in the words of a Smart Valley Board member, “a high-speed, fully capable, broad band infrastructure—so every home, every office will have access to high speed communications.” Another engineer member added “that the industry that was responsible for creating this technology felt they had a responsibility to get our local society to use it more effectively.” This group has transformed marketing into a mission, using the language of a social movement. Articulating the mission an interviewee said: 

Silicon Valley is reviving an old notion, reinventing the company town. The classic portraits of a company town describe a single company, maybe a mining or logging company, often geographically isolated, that owns the land, housing, service facilities, and public utilities and dominates the business life of the community even though other private enterprises may exist. Company towns are administered communities, not exclusively representative of the residents’ interests, but the company’s need to succeed in a given industry. Joint Venture Silicon Valley has successfully redefined the concept of a company town. Using lobbying, government partnerships and “innovative initiatives,” companies have reached out to redesign the governance, schools, utilities and even health care facilities of the community to make it “a better place for business.”

Assumptions Revisited

In the process of doing these projects we often stumbled over assumptions we discovered to be misleading. These premises often go unquestioned, because they reflect the everyday way we think about technology and family, but they keep us from gaining important insights into the interplay of technology, family and community. 

First, we discovered that people don’t just own or use individual devices, but ecosystems of technologies at home. Pagers, faxes, cell phones, telephone answering systems and computers are used together to serve the goals of individuals and families. Second, family use of technology is not trivial, but underpins important cultural work done by families. Families frame playing computer games as gaining “computer literacy” and providing a common activity for “being a family.” Third, contrary to prevailing mythology, especially common in Silicon Valley, families and communities are not transformed into wholly new things by technologies. Instead the technologies allow families to put old behaviors and relations into new contexts. The old family game of control and resistence to control is being played out on E-mail, but the game remains. Fourth, technology does not just play a economic role in defining families and communities, but also a metaphorical, symbolic one. As information technology allows households and communities to become places of production, it also changes the way such social institutions think of themselves. Families and communities, like upgraded software can be “refreshed” or “reinvented.” Families can then become a kind of product. Finally, the pivotal assumption that work is done at a workplace and family life is lived at home is much too simplistic. Many forces, not the least of which is the technical ability to work from home, have blurred the domains. If time at the workplace does not really reflect the time spent working, how does that effect family leaves or the length of a work week? 

The forces that shape community and family include many factors, not just information technologies. Yet we need to know how the many devices entering people’s lives are actually used by real people. They are creating culture as they make decisions about what constitutes work, family and community. I am part of the culture, as you may well be. You have been given a handout, an inventory of digital devices that we use when making observations about household technology. Feel free to take the inventory home and consider how you use the technologies. What roles do these devices play in your own life? How do they sustain or change your relationships? How will the sum of these small impacts change the way we live? It is not homework, you need not return the inventory to me, but use it as our interviewee do, to reflect on the changes we rarely question. 
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