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| LIFE IN THE VALLEY | |
 April 7, 1999 
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RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: The traffic is bad tonight in the Silicon Valley. Men and women who glide through the day along the information superhighway are stalled in 5 o'clock gridlock. Don't misunderstand. I own a computer. I use it daily and for ever longer periods of time. I send and receive E-mail more than I use the phone. I surf the World Wide Web. What darkens my enthusiasm for the technology of the Silicon Valley is its disconnection from our flesh-and-blood lives. Everyone knows that in cyberspace you can change your sex or age, present a new persona to unknown others. Here at the recently opened Technology Museum of Innovation in San Jose, visitors can visit the chat cafe, where they can toy with anonymity. Not surprisingly, anonymous communication quickly turns into graffiti. A survey recently found that the longer people use computers, the lonelier they become. At the museum, the best exhibits are those that unfortunately allow only one person at a time, like the bobsled. You have to line up to play. It's a case of technology clashing again with our real lives-- the freeway, our bodies. The great Cartesian dream of the 17th century was to locate the meaning of our lives in the mind. "I think, therefore I am," mused Rene Descartes. The Silicon Valley, this high- tech center of the known world, is the Cartesian dream realized-- almost. In our flesh-and-blood lives, there are concrete obstacles. Congestion on the Silicon Valley's freeway is the worst in California. And while you may be able to abandon your body when you enter cyberspace, finally you need to have an address in mortar and wood. Housing costs continue to rise in the Valley. But where exactly is this place called the Silicon Valley? The odd thing, the oddest thing, is that no one can say. It's like looking for Hollywood. Silicon Valley is as much legendary as it is a place on the map. Just ask. Some people will tell you it's bounded by San Mateo in the North; others say that Silicon Valley runs farther North to San Francisco. Some people say it runs South to Gilroy; others insist that it has spread across the coastal mountains to Santa Cruz -- 50 square miles - 100 - 200. No matter. Let's just say that the Silicon Valley is that part of California that comes closest to the edge we call the future, though lately the news of the future has not been good. There has been, for example, a steady decline in high school graduation rates in the Silicon Valley. Last year, only 70 percent graduated. At the grammar school level, the news is more alarming; for example, only 51 percent of third graders scored at or above the national medium in reading comprehension, which leads to an obvious irony: We may be developing the most extraordinary technologies of communication the world has ever known at a time when vast numbers of us cannot read. By far, the largest city in the Silicon Valley is San Jose. It has become the biggest city in Northern California, bigger than its glamorous rival, San Francisco, which used to sneer that San Jose was not a city at all, but a series of freeway exits. There is booster pride here, pride in the new hotels and the high-tech museum and the city's professional ice hockey team, a charming American air. Here are people who believe in the future despite the freeway traffic and the troubles with the schools. San Jose likes to call itself now the capital of the Silicon Valley. In truth, that is a bit of a stretch. The title belongs more properly to wealthier Palo Alto, 20 miles away. But to come to San Jose, to see these American faces, is to remember that we all walk in sunlight or in rain. There is something blessed about these mundane streets. We do not live, after all, on a Web page. Most of us inhabit a real town that looks very much like Des Moines or Hartford. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
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