Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland OC OBCis a Canadian novelist and artist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as "McJob" and "Generation X". He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. A specific feature of Coupland's novels...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth30 December 1961
CountryCanada
Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.
It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.
When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.
So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.
I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.
Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.
What if it was cats who invented technology, would they have TV shows starring rubber sqeaky toys?
Technology favors horrible people.
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.
A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.
Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.
Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.
Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.
The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.