Silicon Alley

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

While the global economy languishes, one place just keeps growing despite failing banks, uncertain markets, and high unemployment: Silicon Valley. In the last two years, more than 100 incubators have popped up there, and the number of angel investors has skyrocketed. Today, 40 percent of all venture capital investments in the United States come from Silicon Valley firms, compared to 10 percent from New York. In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem where meritocracy rules the day. She explores Silicon Valley's exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business. Drawing on interviews with investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, as well as a host of case studies from Google to Paypal, Piscione argues that Silicon Valley's unique culture is the best hope for the future of American prosperity and the global business community and offers lessons from the Valley to inspire reform in other communities and industries, from Washington, DC to Wall Street.

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society discusses media around the world in their varied forms—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, books, music, websites, social media, mobile media—and describes the role of each in both mirroring and shaping society. This encyclopedia provides a thorough overview of media within social and cultural contexts, exploring the development of the mediated communication industry, mediated communication regulations, and societal interactions and effects. This reference work will look at issues such as free expression and government regulation of media; how people choose what media to watch, listen to, and read; and how the influence of those who control media organizations may be changing as new media empower previously unheard voices. The role of media in society will be explored from international, multidisciplinary perspectives via approximately 700 articles drawing on research from communication and media studies, sociology, anthropology, social psychology, politics, and business.

Why employees of pioneering Internet companies chose to invest their time, energy, hopes, and human capital in start-up ventures. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. In Venture Labor, Gina Neff investigates choices like these made by high-tech workers in New York City's “Silicon Alley” in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs—investing time, energy, and other personal resources that Neff terms “venture labor”—when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs? Neff argues that this behavior was part of a broader shift in society in which economic risk shifted away from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk and reward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibility was gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, Neff finds not the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informed variously by bravado, naïveté, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices with larger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments that support workers.

Starting in the early 1990s, journalists and scholars began responding to and trying to take account of new technologies and their impact on our lives. By the end of the decade, the full-fledged study of cyberculture had arrived. Today, there exists a large body of critical work on the subject, with cutting-edge studies probing beyond the mere existence of virtual communities and online identities to examine the social, cultural, and economic relationships that take place online. Taking stock of the exciting work that is being done and positing what cyberculture’s future might look like, Critical Cyberculture Studies brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary group of scholars from around the world to assess the state of the field. Opening with a historical overview of the field by its most prominent spokesperson, it goes on to highlight the interests and methodologies of a mobile and creative field, providing a much-needed how-to guide for those new to cyberstudies. The final two sections open up to explore issues of race, class, and gender and digital media's ties to capital and commerce—from the failure of dot-coms to free software and the hacking movement. This flagship book is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic and increasingly crucial study of cyberculture and new technologies.

Engaging the thematic issues of the Web as a space where magic, metaphor, and power converge, the chapters cover such subjects as The Web and Corporate Media Systems, Conspiracy Theories and the Web; The Economy of Cyberpromotion, The Bias of the Web, The Web and Issues of Gender, and so on.

Following the restructuring process which swept away the traditional manufacturing economy of the inner city 25 years ago, new industries are transforming these former post-industrial landscapes. These creative, technology-intensive industries include Internet services, computer graphics and imaging, and video game production. The development dynamics of these new sectors are volatile in comparison with those of the classic ‘Industrial City’. But these new industries highlight the unique role of the inner city in facilitating creative processes, innovation and social change. Further, they reflect the intensity of interaction between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ in the metropolis, and represent key agencies of urban place-making and re-imaging. This book addresses the critical intersections between process and place which underpin the formation of creative enterprises in the emergent industrial districts of the ‘new inner city’. It contains intensive case studies of industrial restructuring within exemplary sites in prominent world cities such as London, Singapore, San Francisco and Vancouver. The studies demonstrate the global reach of development and innovation across these cities and sites, marked by clustering, rapid firm turnover, and interdependency between production and consumption activity. The evocative case studies, brought to life by interviews, sequential mapping exercises, media narratives, and photography, also disclose the importance of local factors (including urban scale, built form, property markets and policy) which shape both the specific industrial structures and socio-economic impacts. The New Economy of the Inner City places inner city new industry formation within the development history of the city, and underscores its role in larger processes of urban transformation. The findings inform a critique and synthesis of urban theory which frame the evolving conditions of the 21st century metropolis. This book would be useful to researchers and students of Geography, Urban Studies, Economics and Planning.