Courthouse Docket Program: Seeing Silicon Valley--the Place, not the Myth

The San Mateo County History Museum will present Stanford professor and author Fred Turner, who will discuss Seeing Silicon Valley—the Place not the Myth based on his new book on January 20, 2024, within the Museum's historic Courtroom A.

Turner maintains that since the earliest days of the public internet, pundits and marketers have promised that digital media will help us build a new and better society. No matter how false this may be, that myth blinds many to the kind of world that technology industries have actually created. Turner's talk will explore that world through the lives of some the region's "uncelebrated" local residents. Their experiences, Turner concludes, reveal the kind of society toward which we may all be hurtling—a society playful and precarious, with an economy open to all, but on radically unequal terms.

Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture. He is the author of five books, including most recently, with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University, a Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University, and twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavorial Sciences at Stanford. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a journalist for ten years. He continues to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe.

Turner's presentation will be followed by a book signing. The program is free with the price of admission to the Museum ($6 for adults, $4 for seniors and students).

This program is part of the Museum's Courthouse Docket Series which is sponsored by the Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation.