In an interview with CNET News sister site Silicon.com, Canadian author Douglas Coupland reveals his attitudes toward 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 in which technology regularly takes center 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, in the decade between "Microserfs" and "JPod," 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 the characters if "JPod" 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 retribalizing effect in Western man."
This "retribalizing" 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 homogenized, creating a situation in which people increasingly identify with each other and feel they are experiencing the same issues in their life.
Retribalizing with "Generation A"
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 retribalizing electronic technologies will do to us," he said.
Coupland's own Web site says of "Generation A" that it "champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world."
Asked if he views technology's effects on society and culture as positive or negative, Coupland tells Silicon.com: "It's neither. It's inevitable and unstoppable so the better question is how are we going to handle it--hide in a cave and bitch, or go out there and try to use it to make the world a better place? Sitting in a cave and bitching is neither noble nor romantic. It's ignorant and pointless."
And what of the latest round of Web 2.0 upstarts, Facebook, Twitter, et al.? Can they have an effect on society and morals? "You're trying to impose morals on something not on a moral scale. That's like getting mad at the weather. You're going to stop these things? Good luck. It's not about you. So instead of bitching we need to analyze impact and try and figure out what happens next."
The question of what's coming next is particularly pertinent for Web companies such as Twitter--after all, the faddish nature of Internet popularity has seen sites attract massive user numbers and VC interest for a number of years before once loyal users eventually begun to drift away to find the next big thing.
"Twitter's actually kind of fun, but it's a hula hoop, and who knows what'll kill it," Coupland said.
There's no doubt the technology moves on quickly--today's social networking must-join often ends up tomorrow's GeoCities. So, having written on a subject so fast-moving, how does Coupland feel his books will age?
"When they came out, some naysayers said they'd date. Wrong. They became time capsules. And if you look at any book that's still in print after 20 years, you'll see that they're also time capsules. It seems to be a prerequisite for endurance--the need to be very specifically rooted in a place and time."
Tim Ferguson of Silicon.com reported from London.
Conde Nast in October is bringing down the curtain on its Web-only brand Men.Style.com and launching sites for two of its print titles, GQ and Details, according to an Advertising Age story and subsequently confirmed by a company official.
Ad Age gives the impression that the move is part of the publisher's overall strategy to align its Web site brands with its print brands.
But, Conde Nast Digital President Sarah Chubb, in a phone interview with CNET News following the Ad Age report, clarified that rather than shutting down and starting fresh with a brand new GQ.com site, Men.Style.com will be rebranded as GQ.com, while Details will launch its own Web site.
Conde Nast's strategy is not necessarily to align the Web sites with the print brands, Chubb said. Rather, the strategy is to align them only in areas where it makes business sense, such as in the men's market with GQ and Details.
Chubb cited as an example the success of the Style.com Web site, which is geared toward women. Vogue enjoys a large presence on Style.com, but the Style site is also huge on its own. Traffic to the Vogue section of Style.com is probably 10 percent or less of the site's total traffic, she said. Overall, Style.com had around 182 million page hits in March, she added.
Men.Style.com is also a big site, noted Chubb, with around 38 million page hits in March. But in this case, GQ accounts for around 35 percent of that traffic.
Based on the traffic and success of the sites, Chubb said it made sense to keep Style.com as its own site but transition Men.Style.com to GQ.com.
"The GQ brand is well known to advertisers," said Chubb. "So we decided to keep that brand vs the Men.Style brand. That was a business decision very specific to the men's market vs our other brands."
Chubb also delved a bit into the history behind Conde Nast's various Web sites.
Sarah Chubb, president of Conde Nast Digital
(Credit: Conde Nast)In the past, Chubb ran a division called CondeNet, which managed Style.com and Epicurious.com--the site for food lovers. Initially, the model for these big, overall sites was to leverage the magazine brands. But the sites were not about the magazines themselves. Chubb said this strategy worked well for a long time.
Then about three years ago, the company looked more closely at the companion Web sites aligned with specific magazines, such as Self.com.
"We found that these companion sites to the magazines proved to be very good at selling subscriptions," said Chubb. "These sites produced good results toward the health of the print publications."
Chubb felt Conde Nast could take some of the branded sections that were part of the larger Web sites and give them their own individual sites. "The goals of these individual sites would be to connect with the readers, sell subscriptions, and encourage renewals," she said.
W magazine got its own dedicated Web site, as did Gourmet and Bon Appetit. And Chubb noted that all of these sites have done well, while the big sites, Epicurious and Style.com have continued to grow.
Though the new magazine-aligned sites were proving successful, they all were managed separately and not handled under the CondeNet umbrella. Further change was needed.
"We pulled together all of the digital assets at the beginning of the year," said Chubb. "Part of the reason was that as a company, we had CondeNet to do business online, and we had other Web sites that were trying to support the magazines. As a result, we had different technology teams and different strategies."
In January of 2009, all of the company's digital properties were reorganized into one division called Conde Nast Digital. One of Chubb's goals with Conde Nast Digital was to look at each Web site, see if it was healthy, and decide what to do with it.
The strategy has now led to the upcoming new GQ and Details Web sites. "When we looked at the content on Men.Style.com, we realized there was overlap between GQ and Men.Style.com," said Chubb. "If we were to create a separate GQ site and keep Men.Style.com, neither would grow beyond a certain point. It would be redundant to have two sites with men's lifestyle and fashion on them."
Finally, another of Chubb's goals is to turn some of the print-aligned Web sites into something greater. "We want to take some of those Web sites away from the original concept of simply being a companion to the print magazine and make them destinations unto themselves," she said.
Functional MRI brain scans show how searching the Internet dramatically engages brain neural networks (in red). The image on the left displays brain activity while reading a book; the image on the right displays activity while engaging in an Internet search.
(Credit: UCLA Newsroom)The University of California at Los Angeles this week gave us the perfect antidote to Nick Carr's musings in The Atlantic about how the Internet is turning us into multitasking scatterbrains with diminishing attention spans.
A group of scientists found that searching the Internet doesn't make computer-savvy, middle-aged and older adults stupid. It actually triggers key centers in the brain that control decision making and complex reasoning. In other words, we might not have to resort to word puzzles and pinochle to fend off senility.
The study, reportedly the first of its kind to assess the impact of Internet searching on brain performance, will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
"The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults," said principal investigator Dr. Gary Small, a professor at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. "Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function."
Researchers tested out 24 volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76. Half were experienced Web searchers, the other half had no experience. The participants performed Web searches and book-reading tasks while undergoing MRI scans.
All participants showed significant brain activity during the book-reading tasks. But there was a major difference between the groups when doing the Internet searches, according to a UCLA press release. "While all the participants demonstrated the same brain activity that was seen during the book-reading task, the Web-savvy group also registered activity in the frontal, temporal, and cingulate areas of the brain, which control decision making and complex reasoning."
So while we, the digerati, may end up easily distracted, fat due to physical inactivity, and in chronic pain due to gadget-related repetitive stress injuries, at least we'll be more likely to keep our wits about us.
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