IFOA 2011: Douglas Coupland

Talk: Douglas Coupland (McLuhan 100 YouTube Talk)

International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre). Tuesday, October 25, 2011.

Unsurprisingly, Douglas Coupland can still draw a full house, filling up the Studio Theatre. And also unsurprisingly, the demographic skewed towards, um, Gen-X types — the sort who would appreciate the first Franz Ferdinand album playing in the background as the room filled.

Freshly returned from travelling in China and possibly a little jetlagged, Coupland brought a loose approach to the night as he took the stage and chatted a bit to set up the terms of engagement: "Tonight's theme is randomness... which gets me off the hook for having to over-prepare things."

He talked about his background with McLuhan ("I'll call him Marshall"), starting from when he was approached by John Ralston Saul to write a biography — which ultimately turned into his entry in Penguin's series on Extraordinary Canadians. Coupland admitted that at the outset he didn't know any more about McLuhan than most people do, and that when he was a young student in 1980 McLuhan had just died, with his academic star at basically its lowest point.

"The reason that a lot of people have a lot of trouble getting into him is that the style of writing is very opaque, it was self-referential... it referenced a lot of people that certainly I haven't read, and it was very slow going."

"One of the reasons that he was also opaque was that he was writing about something that did not yet exist — he was writing, of course, about the internet... he was doing so forty-five, fifty years ahead of its existence. He was trying to explain something very high-tech very poetically."

Promising a "celebration of Marshall, the things he said and how they actually played out in real life" as well as "a celebration of the medium that emerged", Coupland sat down at a chair with a laptop in front of him and basically started typing search terms into YouTube, the audience laughing with recognition as the autocomplete started to suggest possibilities as they watched along on the large projection screen behind him. Far from any sort of dusty lecture, the event took on the cast of hanging out at a friend's house as they randomly call up their favourite viral videos and adding their own cultural commentary. "What most people know about Mr. McLuhan is this scene right here," Coupland said as he ran the clip from Annie Hall:

Coupland was watching along with the audience, "immersed in the medium that actually ended up emerging thirty, forty years post-Gutenberg Galaxy. And I'm going to do two things here: I want to celebrate the medium, and we're going to do that by putting in these codewords..." And yes, he was tying baby beluga mariachi:

This was the spark for some discussion on how social media has created the "tribal villages" that McLuhan theorized, splitting people along fissures far more nuanced than along the old ethnic or cultural lines. This allows for "aggregation of people in new and interesting ways" bringing about, say, #ows.

"One of the ultimate questions about the tribalizing capacity of technology is... the new medium, is it ultimately a secularizing influence or is it one that fosters orthodoxy, political or religious?"

Coupland talked about the explosion of television in the 50's — "a very cathartic event" and something that McLuhan talked about a lot — as an analogue to the massively transformative nature of the internet in the past decade. That gave him cause to randomly skip ahead in his notes, picking up a slightly different thread from McLuhan, reading from from "What TV Does Best" (1976): "one of the effects of television is to remove people's private identity. They become corporate peer-group people just by watching it. They lose interest in being private individuals. And so this is one of the hidden and perhaps insidious effects of television." This is obviously something that the internet has accelerated rather exponentially:

It turned out that the random theme was also about canoeing through a McDonalds ("how would you ever see that otherwise?"):

Coupland talked about what it means to be global:

This lead to some discussion about his father, and how any holdout from the information age can be roped in once they're shown whatever thing that captivates them (say, airshow disaster videos) is instantly available on youtube. After a couple more stories about his dad, Coupland had to remind himself to rope it in, flipping through his notes and settling back on tribalism, and relating it to his own experience in perpetuating one particular tribalistic idea in the form of the "Gen X meme, whatever it was or is." He mused about how corporate forces would try to exploit it, just as powerful forces tried to cash in on and exploit McLuhan's ideas, though ultimately it was really only the advertisers who found some sort of application for it — finding something similar in his own experience:

That led to some thoughts about the new ways of creating identities beyond old categories like nationalism — and ultimately beyond privacy, leading to the explosion of microidentities in ways that seems astonishing compared to the options of even a generation ago. "When I went to high school, you were a jock or you were a nerd or you smoked. And that was pretty much it. I smoked. Nowadays you can be twenty-seven different things if you're in elementary school — I'm kind of jealous of these kids."

Coupland then took it to the source to give a taste of what McLuhan looked and sounded like:

He interacted with the medium by poking at McLuhan's eyes with the cursor as he listened, occasionally pausing to inject a thought. Watching McLuhan's manner of expression brought home Coupland's point that McLuhan's own mind worked randomly, so a drifting approach and "poetic" consideration can bring us closer to him. This seemed to put things solidly on track, perhaps necessitating a random left turn:

Perhaps to serve the argument that our universal distractability with these clips is a uniting factor, creating a sort of collapsed-flattened world, arousing a type of sympathy in us when we see things like this:

Or — and I think this was the point — more importantly, that it creates a feeling of sympathy when we see things like this¹:

The internet allows life and art to interact with each other in stranger, more immediate ways:

And in a world where "information follows information follows information", you can then skip tangentially to this:

And then, back again to reality:

Added up, these clips demonstrate how we live in a state of "information transparency, superfluence, all-pervasiveness, and it's not going to stop — it's only going to get weirder and weirder." Coupland related this to McLuhan's love of the poem "The Maelstrom" (by Cleanth Brooks, referencing Poe's story "A Descent Into the Maelstrom") and the notion that when in the chaos of the gyre, one can survive by finding something to cling to. In the case of informational whirlpools, that thing which can provide the key to survival is pattern recognition — or even just searching for patterns.

Coupland wrapped up the presentation by giving a quick primer on approaching McLuhan: start with Gutenberg Galaxy ("read it before you read Understanding Media"), and "look through it, be generous, think of him as a poet... If you can't figure it out, figure out what it might be applying to coming down the road next."²

With that, there was an appendix, with Coupland bringing up illustrator Graham Roumieu (author of Bigfoot tale Me Write Book), with whom he collaborated on the just-released Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People. This was a bit of a 180 on the evening ("sorry for the bait and switch," said Coupland), with it suddenly feeling like Coupland was hosting a talk show. There was some chat about the book, and some of the art projected on the screen, and although this was befittingly random, it sorta derailed the night's earlier ramshackle momentum as things more or less ambled to an end.³

Photo credit: readings.org.

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¹ I couldn't find the exact same news clip that Coupland used of the Banda Ache tsunami, but this seems to incorporate the same footage.

² Said Coupland, "if he's right about 2011, he's probably right about ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now as well." But this seems like a bit of an ex post facto confirmation bias fallacy to me: if someone said of the predictions in Nostradamus or the Book of Revelation that they were obviously true, but some of the predictions just hadn't happened yet, we wouldn't take that to be a strong argument for their accuracy.

³ Those with a hankering for more McLuhan should check out the Dew Line Festival with a series of art events taking place this weekend (November 5-10, 2011).