The Digital City The American Metropolis and Information Technology

by Laguerre, Michel S.

• ISBN13: 9781403997104
• ISBN10: 1403997101
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Evolving out of a research project on information technology and society, the book explores the digitization of the American city. Laguerre examines the impact of changes to various sectors of society, brought about by the advent of information technology and the Internet upon daily life in the contemporary American metropolis. The book focuses on actual information technology practices in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco metropolitan area, explaining how those practices are remoulding social relations, global interaction and the workplace environment.

Author Biography

Michel S. Laguerre is Professor and Director of the Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	x
Preface	xii
Introduction	1	(1)
The digital city	1	(1)
Research setting	2	(2)
Outline of the chapters	4	(3)
IT as Process and Globalization as Outcome	7	(18)
The digital identity of the city	9	(1)
IT and the city: Approaches and interpretations	10	(5)
Information technology, globalization, and the city	15	(3)
The IT network infrastructure of globalization	18	(4)
The globalization of the digital city	22	(1)
Conclusion	23	(2)
Teleworkers and Telemanagers: IT and Telecommuting in the Digital City	25	(41)
Telecommuting	26	(3)
The physical and social fragmentation of the workplace	29	(14)
The destructuring and dissemination of work time	43	(5)
Teleworkers and telemanagers: Reconfiguring labor relations	48	(9)
Strategies for the digital workplace	57	(4)
Partial digital decentralization/centralization	61	(1)
Telecommuting and globalization	62	(2)
Conclusion	64	(2)
The Digital Office	66	(31)
Theoretical conceptualizations of the digital office	66	(3)
The parameters of the digital office	69	(3)
Project-induced virtuality	72	(2)
Workplace expansion	74	(3)
Virtual communication	77	(2)
Surveillance and control	79	(3)
The pace of digital work	82	(1)
What happens when the computers break down?	83	(6)
The transformative role of IT	89	(6)
Conclusion	95	(2)
Virtual City Hall: The Governance of Local E-Government	97	(28)
A history of a virtual city hall	99	(5)
The micropolitics of city hall's Web sites	104	(5)
The content and structure of the digital city on the Web	109	(6)
Communicating with the citizenry	115	(5)
Limits of the Web for democratic practices	120	(2)
Digitization and globalization	122	(1)
Conclusion	123	(2)
Virtual Diasporas and Cyberspace	125	(18)
Virtual immigration	126	(2)
The virtual diaspora	128	(5)
Virtual diasporic space as networked space	133	(2)
Virtual diasporic space and transnational politics	135	(4)
Virtual diasporic space: The Silicon Valley and Port-au-Prince circuit	139	(1)
Conclusion	140	(3)
Virtual Time: The Processuality of the Cyberweek	143	(20)
Virtual time and the cyberweek	144	(3)
The collapse of temporal boundaries	147	(2)
The compression of time-distance	149	(1)
Cybertiming the civil week	149	(3)
Flextiming the civil week	152	(2)
Behavioral decoupling of time zones	154	(3)
Temporal unevenness	157	(1)
Real-time schedules and virtual time	158	(2)
Synchronized and desynchronized connectivity	160	(1)
Conclusion	161	(2)
Conclusion: The Digital City as the Virtual Embodiment of the Global City	163	(9)
Global digital practices of the city	164	(5)
The global and virtual fragmentation of the city	169	(2)
The virtual embodiment of the global city	171	(1)
Notes	172	(16)
Bibliography	188	(10)
Index	198