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, documenting and explaining how those practices are remoulding social relations, global interaction and workplace environments. The book shows that digital communication has contributed to the social transformation of the city because of the virtual practices it engenders, and argues that the virtual has transformed the modern American city profoundly by turning it into a digital city, thus enabling it to engage in new processes of globalization. Laguerre concludes by suggesting that as a result of the intermingling of virtuality with reality in the deployment of everyday life, the digital city ends as being neither more nor less than the virtual embodiment of the global city.