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T A B L E__T A L K What do you look for in a video game? Discuss platforms, plots and graphics in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The war for your e-mail box By Andrew Leonard Do we need anti-spam laws? Some Net veterans think the unthinkable (10/30/98) The 21st Challenge No. 15: Haiku for telemarketers By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Write a poem -- win a prize (10/30/98) Is culture endangered in the digital age? By Chris Bray Ironies abound at a Los Angeles conference pondering the future of museums and libraries (10/29/98) Blame it on Rio By Janelle Brown Netheads love the MP3 digital-music format. Why does the music industry hate it so much? (10/28/98) Prime time for hackers is over By Richard Thieme Why did a consultant hack a US West network to solve a 17th-century math problem? (10/27/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log MoveOn campaign moves offline; millennium pundit vs. Wired - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

The Tech Museum is full of innovative wonders -- just don't expect to see the Valley's darker side represented. BY SIMON FIRTH | Listen to the principal movers behind San Jose's new Tech Museum ofInnovation and it's clear they have high hopes for the city's newestcultural institution. "It puts San Jose on the map as the capital of Silicon Valley," said San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer at a press preview last week. At the same event, John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems and chair of the museum's board, celebrated the creation of a building that would "put the Valley's role in the global economy into perspective." "Silicon Valley," he reminded us, "is driving a significant part of the world economy." And Peter Anderson, Museum Project executive director, hailed the place as "a visitors' interpretive center for the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley." The Tech, as its creators like to call it, opened its new and permanent home to the public this past weekend. It is an impressive achievement and promises to be extremely popular. But for the Valley's worthies and boosters, there is clearly more at stake than simply providing the area with a decent science museum. For one thing, as the mayor's comments suggest, the Tech is the biggest chip yet played in San Jose's bid to be recognized as the headquarters of the obstinately amorphous region that is Silicon Valley. Warnock's hopes for worldwide attention suggest that the Valley as a whole still feels globally underappreciated and is looking to the Tech to help itself get over its inferiority complex. And Anderson's description reveals perhaps the most interesting anxiety of all: that without something like the Tech Museum to visit, there's really no reason for anyone who isn't nailing down a high-tech business deal -- that's most of us -- to come to Silicon Valley at all. Before asking whether the Tech can bear the symbolic weight with which it has been freighted, it's worth first exploring what the museum actually is. A geometric, medium-size building, painted a bright Southwestern mango and azure and set on a plaza in the middle of San Jose, the museum cost $96 million to build and has been more than 20 years in the making. Inside you'll find an IMAX cinema, several spaces for conferences, groups and school parties, the obligatory restaurant and gift shop and five galleries. Four of these are permanent and are the real core of the enterprise: exhibition spaces devoted to communications, biotechnology, exploration and technical innovation. The fifth is a space for temporary exhibitions called "Center of the Edge," currently occupied by the imaginings of the future-gazers at Interval Research. The danger was that the Tech, feeling the need to prove itself capable of cultural gravitas, would try to turn its permanent exhibitions into a sort of Smithsonian of the semiconductor. Besides the fact that a funky commercial riff on this theme already exists in the shape of the Sunnyvale Fry's Electronics superstore, that approach would have produced an uninvolving experience that paled in comparison with the growing legions of science and technology museums around the country and the rest of the world. Understandably, then, the Tech's designers went the other way. Their galleries contain very little of the history behind the technology they feature. Instead, they've adopted the "learn-by-playing" model pioneered by science and technology institutions like San Francisco's Exploratorium, and tried to take it a step further. For the most part they've succeeded -- each gallery is stuffed with exhibits that, for once, really are exemplars of that overused cliché, interactivity. N E X T_P A G E .|.How fully does the Tech reflect the realities of Silicon Valley?