Douglas Coupland gets why people are getting hooked on Twitter.
Sitting in his Canadian publisher’s head office, the author long-associated with being at the cutting edge of pop phenomena can, and does, talk non-stop about the social media tool. But Twitter's usefulness, the 47-year-old Vancouver-based author says, is that it allows us to keep an active record of the trivial bits of our lives.
"Every day, one or two things happen to you that have no large place in the cosmic sphere," he says, sipping from a cup of black coffee on an early fall morning. "That's what Twitter is for. If you're in Holt Renfew waiting for someone to help you, you can tweet about it."
Immediately sensing how strange that statement must sound to non-tweeters, Coupland is quick with his rebuttal. "Even if you think it's pretty silly, it becomes important when something like the Iranian election happens."
Twitter doesn’t make an appearance in his latest novel, "Generation A," a quasi-sequel to 1991's career-making debut "Generation X." But this biting observation of how people compete to constantly remake themselves online fits nicely with the well-worn existential path he's traversed while chronicling the so-called 'entitlement generation.'
Even Facebook, which Coupland hasn't joined, is fertile ground for his imagination.
"Graduation is, in its own way, very cruel," he says. "Especially if you've gone through kindergarten to Grade 12 with the same people and then – poof – you don't see each other until an awkward reunion 10 years later.
"With Facebook," he adds, "it seems like a high school reunion that never ends."
The bee-less future Coupland dreams up in "Generation A" is equally as strange.
Five characters from various locales: Diana, an Ontario woman with Tourette's; Harj, a Sri Lanken call centre worker who lost his family in the 2004 tsunami; Julien, a French video game fanatic; Samantha, a New Zealander with a fondness for earth sandwiches; and Zack, a farmer whose nude crop harvesting video ends up on the Internet, are drawn together after each is stung by a bee.
The overnight celebrity that ensues from this groundbreaking event, leads to the quintet dabbling with Solon, a drug that allows users to disengage from the future, and a climax that involves the characters being forced to tell each other made-up stories in a remote part of British Columbia.
But the new book is not a direct sequel to "Generation X," Coupland says.
"There are a few threads that connect the two. They both deal with characters that have to deal with the sensation of being bombarded with information of all types and they both deal with people, albeit this time not so young, telling stories that reveal patterns in their own lives."
It is from these patterns, he continues, that the characters can hopefully make sense of a world in which average people spill their guts on the Internet when the prospect of instant fame beckons.
And if blogging was the way to take on a brand new personality five years ago, vlogging, Facebook and Twitter are the methods of today.
Still, he's surprised that despite having many options to help figure out what they want to do with their lives, most of today's youth are just as antsy and edgy as their Gen X predecessors.
"If you don't know what you like doing by 30, you're toast," he says. "You have to figure out what it is you actually like doing and a lot of people can't do that. When I ask people what do they like doing, a lot of times they just look at me blankly and mutter, 'Um, I like going to movies.' And when I say, 'Something you can do or like to do,' they stare at me blankly.
"And 38 is when the floor falls out. Suddenly, you're the coyote over the canyon. And 40 is where you don't just panic, you s--- your pants. There's not much left you can change about your life anymore."
So is technology to blame?
"I'm not some big cheerleader for technology," he says. "People make that mistake with me. I don't like things indiscriminately; I'm particular about what I like."
Just because people can download all the books they want or, thanks to Facebook, try to take another shot at being the cool kid in high school, doesn't mean they should, he says.
"I have never gone to a Facebook page. I don't know what they look like; I don't know anything about them. Life's too short," he smiles.
"Even tweeting is a pain in the a--."
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On the Net:
www.coupland.com
