Novel by Douglas Coupland, a Canadian writer who explores the unexpected cultural shifts created by the impact of new technologies on middle class North American culture. Persistent themes include the conflict between secular and religious values, ironic attitudes as a response to intense media saturation, and an aesthetic fascination with pop culture and mass culture.
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In JPod, the little brothers and sisters of Generation X slave away at a thinly-disguised EA Games in Vancouver, where marketdroids reward their slavish labor by heaping menial tasks on them, and perverting the games they make so that they’re not even cool. None of these people will be a software millionaire. They are people who work sweatshop hours for lousy wages, burn out young, and go nowhere. They use Google and eBay to scour the globe for anything to make their lives meaningful. They don’t find it. JPod boingboing review |
It was fun at the beginning, ... that’s it! It tries hard to be witty, but in the end it’s just a moralistic, pompous and clumsy mess without any emotion! It was supposed to catch & mock the spirit of our online/techno culture (“google age”), but it just feels “behind”; e.g. what about the participatory/collaborative nature of the web “2.0”?
It looks the author just rote How To Totally Fake Being A Geek.
At least, the writing style is nice, fluid and somehow entertaining. But posed irony and outdated cultural references alone don’t make a book! – Tired post modernism!