First stop: Silicon Valley, natch. My assignment is to report and write several
stories for TIME magazine's special June 4 issue on Interactivity, and what
better place to start than the center of the digital universe. I arrive in San
Jose, fully expecting to bump into Scott McNealy (of Sun Microsystems fame) at
the restaurant of my hotel and spy Apple's Steve Jobs checking his e-mail over a
double latte at a downtown Internet café.
As it turns out, San Jose looks and feels nothing like the "Capital of Silicon
Valley" it claims to be; with its brownstone houses and tree-lined avenues, it
is scarcely distinguishable from any number of small American towns. Contrary to
my expectations, diners at San Jose restaurants do NOT pore over computer code
on their laptops as they scarf down their salad. People in the street are NOT
constantly twiddling with their Palms. Why, the concierge at the Hyatt isn't
sure the town even HAS an Internet café!
The only place where the town bares its high-tech soul is in the pages of its
newspapers. They're full of news about technology companies -- most of it bad,
because of the industry's recent poor run of form. In the editorial pages, tech
gurus hold forth on the digital divide, the gulf between affluent nations that
have easy access to computers and Third World countries that do not. The gap,
they warn, is widening at an alarming rate.
But such gloomy thoughts are far from my mind the evening I take a bus ride to
the nearby town of Gilroy, the self-styled "Garlic Capital of the World." I'm
off to meet an old friend who recently renewed our acquaintance thanks to the
miracle of e-mail.
Ten minutes into the ride, it strikes me that I might be the only non-Hispanic
on board; everybody around me speaks Spanish. I try to make conversation with
the man sitting next to me. Pablo Luna mends banged-up automobiles for a San
José used-car salesman. A swarthy, sweaty thirtysomething with a rasping,
sergeant-at-arms voice, he kindly overlooks my broken Spanish and comes back
with almost impeccable English. ("Not like other Latinos, no?" he says,
proudly.) He asks me what I'm doing in the U.S. I tell him about TIME magazine's
upcoming "Interactive" issue. He nods, absently, then says: "Well, you're in the
right place. This is Silicon Valley." He breaks into a self-satisfied grin of a
man who's just delivered the punch line of a good joke.
But the grin quickly disappears when I ask him how often he uses a computer.
"Don't have one," he says, now shamefaced. "Wouldn't know what to do with it."
He could e-mail relations in Mexico, I suggest. Or surf the Internet. Pablo
isn't convinced. "I write maybe one letter a year, to my father. He lives in a
village near Guadalajara and has probably never heard of a computer." As for the
Internet, "that's for rich Anglos. I do all my shopping at K-Mart."
Has he ever used a computer? Yes, a couple of times, at his brother's house. "He
has teenage boys, and they're into that stuff," he explains. His nephews showed
Pablo, a high-school dropout, how to buy groceries online. But he was
unimpressed. "I'm not so old that I can't walk to my grocery store," he says
defiantly. Then, more quietly, he admits, "I couldn't afford a computer,
anyway."
Never mind the Third World: Do Silicon Valley's tech gurus know about the
digital divide in their own backyard?
Next week: Don't Diss The 'Burbs! How high-tech innovation is thriving in the
suburbs of Washington D.C.
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