Professor Murphy will use the award to conduct final research trips and complete her manuscript Terms of Service: Silicon Valley and the Digital Imaginary. Murphy's work offers a critique of innovation and a history of how it has shaped the American tech industry and, by extension, the experiences of contemporary computer users. Utilizing cultural ethnography, media industry studies, and archival research, Murphy reframes the history of the Silicon Valley tech industry - and its drive to innovate at all costs - and argues that we must urgently understand the origins of tech innovation and reexamine the terms we have tacitly accepted as we use Silicon Valley products in our everyday contemporary media environment.
