It’s not that often that a novel really really resonates with me.

But, for all its unfavourable reviews reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation A was such a visceral experience. I loved it. Every word.

Coupland’s mourning of or reflection on the shift from authentic communication in an ever-more isolated, ever more digital, ever more Tweeting world.

The book pulls together a heap of fragmented ideas and thoughts we’re all grappling with at the moment – -the overarching theme of which is just how silly we have all become.

Maybe not ‘all’ – - but people like me. Digital Natives.

I don’t want to sit and write a long drawn out review.

I just think two golden nuggets of thoughts from the novel are things that should make all of us think. Even just for a moment or two.

One, the idea that humans telling stories to humans is what makes us human.

Is there any truth in that?

I think so.

But why should the progression of technology diminish rather than increase the stories we tell?

Over the history of time the evolution of technology has changed the tools available to storytellers.

First writing, the use of actual digit symbols to represent language.

Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed, or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling

So now our stories can be told in text messages to our friends, in Tweets, on blogs. They can be mashed up and regurgitated and change like chinese whispers. We tell stories in our Facebook status updates. We download them, we watch them, we eat them for breakfast.

Technology doesn’t have to change storytelling for the worse. If we stop being silly about it. If we listen to other people’s stories.

I think that is what Generation A is illustrating. Self-consciously but magically. The stories they tell each other, the story itself, the author and who he is – the best novelist of all time in my opinion, and yet someone who uses the digital age to help shape his ideas, and who takes to new methods of telling stories better than anyone I’ve come across.

Coupland – @dougcoupland – himself is my favourite Tweeter (or Twitterer or whatever the correct term might be)…

Because every Tweet sparks an idea.

And his voice, stays with me through my day.

And that brings me to the second idea – - the title of this post and a concept touched upon briefly in Generation A – - something I can’t escape…

When you read whose voice is it you hear inside your head? Who is your narrator?

Mine, I’ve realised, is Douglas Coupland. Even when I’m sitting with a cup of tea reading Take a Break.

I can’t articulate what I think about Generation A anywhere near as well as I wish I could.

It’s so frustrating. But it’s like writing – I have to play it around, mix it up and spill words out in the hope an idea will take off and I can run with it…

So apologies if this makes no sense.

I just feel so bloomin’…

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