Douglas Coupland: "To say the machines have won over people, is like saying people won over people..."

In an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Canadian author Douglas Coupland reveals his attitudes towards technology and its influence on his zeitgeist-defining books.

Douglas Coupland has been a keen observer of technology's impact on society for almost two decades. Through novels such as Microserfs, which charts the progress of Microsoft employees during the mid-1990s, and JPod, which tells a parallel tale of computer game developers in thrall to Google a decade later, he has consistently associated the development of technology with the progress of society.

1995's Microserfs paints a picture of people adjusting to the new technology-driven world, having seemingly desirable and well paid jobs at Microsoft but struggling to find anything meaningful in their lives.

JPod, published in 2006, updates technology's story via a cast of characters working as developers for a computer game company. The developers are constantly asked to stifle their creativity by marketing staff, and exist in an increasingly digital world where people are becoming less able to focus on the task at hand.

Yet for an author of books where technology regularly takes centre stage, Coupland isn't particularly interested in it from a practical point of view. "I'm a so-so user of technology. Mac user since 1988. Hate phones. Kind of hate email. Use [TV service] TiVo, not real-time broadcasts. Nothing too unusual," he tells silicon.com.

Coupland describes his attitude towards technology as "McLuhanesque" after Canadian thinker, Marshall McLuhan, who came up with the view that communication technology is merely an extension of the human senses, body and mind, rather than something separate.

It's a view Coupland demonstrates in his 1998 novel Girlfriend in a Coma in which one character tells a friend who has just emerged from a 17-year coma to the world of 1996: "It's not up for debate. We lost. Machines won."

Coupland says the very point of this line is to demonstrate that the idea is essentially wrong: the character in question, Hamilton, is what Coupland describes as a "very corrosive" individual who often makes bold claims to create a reaction rather than actually providing a real insight.

"How can technology only ever be anything except an extension of our own bodies?" Coupland asks. "To say the machines have won over people is like saying people won over people, because they're one and the same."

Nevertheless, between Microserfs, published in 1995 and JPod, published in 2006, a shift in the characters' relationship with technology is evident.

In Microserfs, characters bond through their efforts to find a meaningful purpose in life beyond the realms of Microsoft, while JPod's characters immerse themselves in their technology-focused jobs to escape the reality of their lives in which they struggle to communicate their feelings and deal with their pasts.

Coupland says the JPod gang are "one decade further down the line of electronic technology causing a retribalising effect in Western man".

This "retribalising" trend is another McLuhan concept that suggests as people gravitate towards new technologies - whether print in McLuhan's case, or today's modern equivalent the internet - the way they receive information becomes more homogenised, creating a situation in which people increasingly identify with each other and feel they are experiencing the same issues in their life.

It's a concept Coupland examines further in his latest novel, Generation A. "It's an extension of what was explored in jPod, an extrapolation into the future of what even more retribalising electronic technologies will do to us," he said.

Picture credit: Top right: Harper Perrenial, Above left: Bloomsbury