Michael Parsons
I saw the author Douglas Coupland speak recently about his new book, Jpod, flagged by his publisher as 'Microserfs for the age of Google'. The book tells the story of a group of techies working on a terrible game development project, and it features much that is familiar to Coupland's fans: obsessive triviality, the wit of clever, geeky tech types and a total immersion into the details of modern digital lives. It's a world of Web surfing, infinite product choice and fragile or non-existent human relationships. In the question period after his talk, Coupland ended up giving a rough timeline of his work, and singled out two historical events as transforming the world he lives in. The first was 9/11. The second was Google.
Google dominates his book as it does the lives of his characters: they spend hours everyday in front of their PCs drowning in the extraordinary diversity of the Web, and frequently succumbing to its many temptations -- gore sites featuring scenes of unspeakable violence, or sites featuring every possible type of pornography. They auction themselves on eBay, plant false biographical information about themselves online to fool each other, and rarely get any work done because the ability to lose themselves in their digital lives has become a siren call they can't resist.
The novel has many maddening quirks (cute typography, the reproduction of thousands of digits of pi over many pages,) and I wouldn't claim it was the best introduction to Coupland's work, but part of the book's weakness -- the sense of being overwhelmed by trivia -- reflects the dangers of getting too close to Google's infinite reach. His characters could of course read noble Web sites like this one, or catch up on the situation in the Middle East. Instead they succumb to the risk of wasting time all the time, faced with the moral hazard of infinite access to endless curious stuff: to Simpsons trivia, to old Star Trek episodes, to fast-food marketing campaigns, to entertainment minutiae. There are moments when the book's own author seems equally distracted.
As a working journalist, the opportunity and threat of online knowledge looms very large; it has of course revolutionised both the way media are consumed and produced. Right now its impact is pretty much limited to deskbound office workers, or those with Wi-Fi connections, but a truly mobile Web will extend this digital avalanche to every corner of our lives. In the world of tech business, it is, of course, de rigeur to do a database check before meeting, essentially beginning the process of getting to know someone by pulling their digital file and checking out what footprints they've left on the Web.
Eventually we'll be able to do this pretty much wherever we are, and our relations with each other will be entirely transformed. I had this experience when driving back from seeing Coupland speak. I didn't know the person driving me home that well, so I slyly Googled her with my handheld, and was able to ask her about her school, and the fact that she'd entered various triathlons, and even her work with a charitable organisation, before she turned and said in surprise, "Are you online?" I admitted that I was, feeling slightly ashamed, as though I had been caught going through documents in the glove compartment, but if you think about it, what I'd been doing was accessing freely available public information. It was a very Coupland moment.
In his remarks after his reading, Coupland characterised the Google phenomenon as something quite uncharacteristic in human history -- at no time have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and from his genuinely awe-struck tone I got the impression he felt that it's really not something our culture as a whole has faced. One of Coupland's characters wonders if a day will come when people will dream of what it was like to be without knowledge, nostalgic for a day when it was possible to be 'clueless'.
Coupland's book will probably annoy all but his biggest fans, and his exploration of what he calls the 'extreme present', may seem whimsical and a bit daft if you're not already tuned into to the wit of his deadpan urban wastrels and their technological obsessions, tics and quirks. What I liked about it was that I recognised in it the daft building blocks of the modern digital day -- the Nigerian spam, emails sent when drunk and the fact that, as one of his characters points out, "documents are 34 per cent more boring when presented in the Courier font". Facing Google means facing ourselves, and it's not a pretty picture.
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