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You know the feeling. You sit at your computer, a dozen windows open on your screen, skipping and clicking among them. You read a paragraph of an article, check movie times, and skim a few news headlines, all while chatting with a friend about your take on last night’s Mad Men. An e-mail pops up and you click over only to find it’s another Amazon promotion. You think for a second that you should unsubscribe, but didn’t you already try that and maybe you can’t unsubscribe from Amazon, and didn’t you mean to buy that book your friend just mentioned?! Suddenly you hit an overload moment and screech to a stop. Wait a minute, you wonder. Is the Internet destroying my brain? It’s not that the information you’re taking in is necessarily trivial—you might be reading about, say, climate change in one of those windows—it’s the way you’re receiving it, in fragmented bits, that frays your consciousness.
More and more, we’re allowing fragments of information to fill our brains, instead of the extended narratives that have long sustained our imaginations and our intellects. Of course, the history of culture is rife with such warnings and often they utterly missed the point of whichever creative development (the novel! photography! movies!) they reviled. And it’s possible to go overboard. Douglas Coupland, in his latest novel, blames the disappearance of storytelling for global warming. But even here, he is getting at something. One climate change group persuasively advocates using stories as a way of breaking through willful ignorance of the realities of climate change. The idea is that stories can do for us what they’ve always done—allow us to understand something that we can’t yet see, to experience something that might be geographically distant. And if the stories break through our fog of information and self-absorption to shock us into awareness of what’s happening to the planet, then maybe we can do something about it. Maybe stories, with their narrative progressions, their beginnings, middles, and ends, their heroes, can save us from ourselves.
Douglas Coupland, for one, would like to think so. When we meet the five protagonists of his new novel, Generation A, they’re 15 years in the future and deep in the virtual headspace of global consumer culture, with little interest in emerging. “I did not wish to be a passive participant in the Internet,” says Harj, an Abercrombie & Fitch call-center employee in Sri Lanka, “I wanted to add my voice to the babble.” Our other characters are Julien, a World of Warcraft devotee who has just been ejected from 114 days in-game; Zack, a Type-A farmer of genetically modified corn, whose harvester is outfitted with several plasma-screened satellite feeds; Diana, a “foul-mouthed ex-church-lady” from Canada; and Samantha, who fills her time with geo-caching-type activities in New Zealand.
Coupland is, of course, riffing on his first novel, Generation X, the 1991 bestseller that named the post-Baby Boom generation and gave a sharply cynical description of its corporate-induced malaise. If Generation X showed us a landscape of shopping malls, housing developments, and landfills overflowing with plastic, Generation A has gone global and much higher-tech. Coupland can caricature the zeitgeist like no one else, and here he homes in on the way our society is defined by its technology. He refers, in a breezy aside, to a moment in time that was “right at the tipping point when handheld devices enslaved the human psyche” or explains that “Amazon increases the need of humans to own books, but not necessarily to read them.” These observations are especially zingy when they come from Zack or Harj, the book’s most compelling characters, who offer frequent, comical indictments of globalization and its pawns.
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