Douglas Coupland, author of famous novels such as Generation X and Microserfs, has written a new novel – Jpod - to be published this month. In Microserfs, published in 1995, Douglas Coupland described the adventures of some guys who start up their own multimedia company in the Bay area. The novel deals with young people, issued from the technology generation, who have lost their identity by working longer than 12 hours a day, have no relationship whatsoever.
In Jpod, Coupland continues his analysis of the technological effects on human beings. The setting takes place in a Vancouver video game company with six workers who deal with changes taking place in our era: Google, privacy, marketing, the rise of China, identity, technological panoptican and money.
Coupland puts emphasis on the Googling generation and how Google has changed the world within a click. Google is compared to God with all the answers it provides to our questions. Talking about this comparison in an interview he gave with TIME, Coupland adds: “This is what God must be like knowing everything.”
Reading Douglas is always fun and for this summer exploring or re-discovering his books will not be such a bad investment!
Written on 2006-05-18
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