Would be driving around and it wouldnt look a whole lot different from a whole lot of other urban areas but then you would start noticing logos, you might see people on the multicolored google likes. You might see people on the advice but so youd see these buildings with the Company Logos on them and that would give you a clue that you are here in the sense of evolving tax. Silicon valley used to be an orchard. It was a lovely bucolic region full of apricot and apple trees and then the Tech Industry came in and now its essentially that worldcom for the Technology Industry so you have almost all the Major Technology players headquartered here. You have google, apple, facebook, twitter, so its taken over the entire region. Most of the Tech Companies are close to each other. Theres traffic permitting probably a 15 minute drive, most of them one from another and you go up in the hills where teslais , their headquarters across that day i have their factory, apple and cupertino in menlo park, were here in Mountain View at google so everywhere you look, you throw a rock, youre going to hit a big tech company. The groups in Silicon Valley lay an Important Role in the local economy and in the california economy. They generate billions of dollars in annual revenue and employee tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands if you put them all together so the there a massive driver of the economy and their essential to the culture here because just about every person you look at is going to be either working for a tech company or is in a business that supports the Tech Companies or is it a business that makes money off of having these people here, getting paid well, doing the work in the tech terms. When i set out to write about tech tourism, i was surprised by the level of it that i discovered but i also talked to a professor of communications at stanford university, greg near described the visits to google, facebook, apple, everywhere as pilgrimages so it really drove home to me how central these companies have become to our lives. They become so central that people want to visit them as if they are some kind of holy grail, as if just being in their presence has value of some sort. And of course it highlighted the value of the selfie to many people because obviously the driving reason for it. Its always so very interesting to me that you have people that are involved in tech and other countries and of course, this is the epicenter here of Silicon Valley technology, its famous for that. You have tech people from all over the world coming here to absorb the energy and witness these places. The size of the role that the Tech Industry plays in Silicon Valley brings positives and negatives and they are both really profound on either side. So you have all these people making good money and spending lots of money, supporting lots and lots of Small Businesses and large businesses. At the flipside of that, you have these people making a lot of money coming here and driving up the rent and increasing the competition for departments, so its become one of the most expensive places in the world to live but people that dont work in the tech sector, the pay is not necessarily owing to be anything close to what the techies are making so if youre trying to make ends meet here, youre going to have a lot of really high costs that derived directly from the presence of tax here in Silicon Valley. The real estate prices and rental prices in particular have caused a lot of discord in the community. And you know, because its affordable for many peoplewho dont work in tech , you also have the issue of the cities that have these companies in them often have very low vacancy rates for rentals and real estate by ends. So the satellite communities where many people live, their prices are going up and the People Living there also are having to commute ridiculous distances and spend hours in their cars every day going to and from work. Its been well publicized thatfacebook has been trying to get housing built , both for employees and also for nonemployees. Because nanoparticles is one of those areas that has little housing compared to the amount of people that work there. And one thing the companies do that is also controversial that also is a boon for reducing traffic is they must their workers to and from work in these big buses that have wifi. They work on board so you get a lot of people on to something that imitates Public Transportation and therefore reduces the deficit on the road so at the same time, those people are living in places where they gentrified the regions of San Francisco for instance and those buses have become a flash point for protest, block and weve had things thrown at them. Theres a lot of anger about the rising prices that are driving lower income people from communities and sort of decimating artistic communities and youth communities. The other huge issue here that falls under the federal government purview and effects Tech Companies is integration. They rely heavily on the age one of the visa system which is a lottery system intended to bring in field workers who are moderately wellpaid. But there have been a number of wellpublicized socalled uses about programs in which outsourcing companies from india have brought in workers and the American Workers have ended up having to train those incoming workers before losing their own jobs. So that when people look at this program which is essential to the tech firms for getting the best talent from overseas. That people were really angry about how the program is used and you dont always see the nuances of the way that program is applied. And there is also some criticism that the workers, that america should be training our own tech workers to occupy a highly paid, highly skilled jobs and that if you are bringing in this talent from overseas, you are just inhibiting what the should happen the best for america in that view. Some people have ill fortune to be, now part of greater Silicon Valley. Originally it was south of Silicon Valley, out Telecom Valley is read in every direction so you have essentially part of the Silicon Valley landscape, at the same time its not the center and the center is where most people go for work. But that is a lot of the benefits, they have a lot of people employed in the tech sector that are living there, spending money, that are absorbing cultural activities and supporting local arts and culture. Restaurants, bars, all this sort of spinoff businesses from the booming economy. What really struck me about reporting on current comings to google and facebook and apple, rather than going to alcatraz for the golden great gate bridge or sometimes in addition to was how deeply we are all affected by what Silicon Valley has, our lives can be drastically simplified by a new, by a new smart phone, by a better email system. We interact with Silicon Valley every day. It reaches out and touches us through all these Technological Innovations that we are using every day, all around the country and all around the world. Our visit to san Jose California continues with local author libreville b, who talked about the role of southern women during and after the civil war in her book worth a dozen men. That took place over three days in 90 degrees heat and cost thousands of courses on the battlefield. There are thousands of corpses of course on the battlefield and all those corpses are running so you think about the stench that theyhad to deal with and you