If you get too excited about technology you end up in Silicon Valley, where pretty much everyone is either making, drinking, or selling Kool-Aid about the potential for technology to make wondrous things happen. In the Valley, there's the added excitement that technology can also make you incredibly wealthy, although the fiercely idealistic geek elite eschew any vulgar mention of money: it's all about trying to change the world, man. The money is just a way to keep score (although judging by the sports cars on Highway 101, it can also be used to buy stuff.)

There's a lot to get excited about in the Valley: cool companies getting huge amounts of money from smart investors, pulling together incredibly smart, hard working teams of people, who very quickly jam out new products and services. Every now and then they produce amazing products that really do take over the world. As a journalist, one of the things I found most seductive about being in the Valley during the internet boom was being around companies that wouldn't stop growing. You'd constantly be driving into some new corporate office where a start-up had just relocated, and go inside to find the CEO surrounded by cardboard boxes and setting up yet another new office.

You don't see that kind of growth as much in most industries in the UK. Most people go to the same offices they went to last year. Most people's economic experience is much slower, involves much less rapid change. Business is doing well, so there are new pot plants in the office. Business isn't doing so well, so the office party budget gets cut. There's much less belief that tomorrow we're all going to get rich. There's also a bit less fear that tomorrow you'll be out of a job. I was shocked when I first moved to the US to discover that I would be paid every two weeks, and couldn't expect more than two weeks notice if I was fired. It seemed to symbolise the difference between the speeds of the two culture.

There's no question that life in the UK is speeding up. Access to credit, people's personal indebtedness, the hours that we work, even our rapid consumption of large cups of expensive milky coffee increasingly mirror the kind of life many people lead in California. We've also gone for technology in a big way: we love our mobile phones, we love the internet, we love our television. When I was growing up, I remember feeling slightly jealous of and slightly superior to all those American kids who grew up in houses with a TV in their bedroom and access to tens of channels, instead of the British ration of a few channels. Now all the affluent children I know are having American childhoods, surrounded by toys, televisions and computer games, like the suburban heroes of a Speilberg movie of the 1970s.

It's not hard to see the similarities as our societies converge, but I'm also interested in the differences. It's easy to believe in America that technology will save you. It's part of the secular religion of progress and success that drives American society. Over here we've also embraced cars, and phones, and TV, and the internet, but we also relish stories about dreadful IT projects run by the government, we loathe the inhuman mechanised service provided by call centres, and there is a rich diet of disdain for technology and technologists.

Sometimes I think this is simply hypocrisy. We like to think we're a bit less vulgar than the cousins, and that we prefer to curl up on the sofa with our Jane Austen, when really we're watching CSI Miami and EastEnders. There's a rich vain of tweedy bullshit in our feigned disdain for the fripperies of the modern world. At the same time, I do think it's harder to come from this country and really believe in technology in the way that Americans intuitively do. A film like Terry Gilliam's Brazil perfectly expresses our cynicism about the gap between what computers and networks and systems are supposed to deliver, and what they actually provide. After the high-tech police force burst threw the ceiling to snatch a terrorist suspect, their maintenance crew follow behind to plug the hole they've drilled, but their plug is too small, and falls through on to the weeping family beneath.

The UK is still a very secular and pragmatic society. As with most religions, I'm not sure we really buy the worship of technology as it is honoured by the American technofuturists. I don’t think we really believe in the utopian vision of the science-fiction dream, where our problems are solved by the touch of button, cars fly, superdrugs cure diseases, and engineering, design and research solve all our problems. We embrace tools like phones, cars and the web that help us out, but we don't take them too seriously. I think this means we're less likely to get our hearts broken, but nor are we going to save the world anytime soon. We'll have to leave that to California.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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