Googled Out

Well, we’re sitting here in the Calgary airport waiting to catch a plane back home and I’m continuing to make my way through Douglas Coupland’s JPod.  I’ve been meaning to get acquainted with Coupland’s work for some time now and the Christmas holidays have provided the perfect opportunity.  JPod follows the (fairly pathetic) lives of a bunch of twenty-something computer programmers who work for a gaming company as they traverse the dreary landscape of postmodernity.  So far, it’s been an interesting read full of memorable passages.

One of the features of postmodern life that Coupland does a particularly good job of lampooning is the ubiquity of technology and what it does to us.  The following comes from the “for no other reason than because it made me laugh” file:

I’ve noticed that as we ramp up our game-building skills… we’re googling every ten minutes. The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.