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I probably shouldn't rate this book as highly as I have, out of respect for those who didn't actually live through it.
For those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, though, and who were of that small fraction of the population who were in on the ground floor of the digital revolution, as it transformed from lawless frontier to settled territory, Coupland's book was like a flag waving for a country which we hadn't quite known we were citizens of. These days, of course, absolutely everyone is online, everyone plays video games, and everyone can craft a little subculture off and away from the popular centrist monoculture offered by Big Media. But back in the 80s, that kind of thing got you labeled a nerd, a geek, an outcast and loser. Given the fact that, outside of sci-fi cons and dial-up BBSs, most of this nerdism was solo activity, it could feel at times like you were the only geek on the planet. This was not a good thing.
What Coupland did was really suggest, for pretty much the first time, that there were now enough nerds in the world, and enough ways to connect them through shared interests and personality traits, to form communities of their own. Microserfs is fiction, but like Uncle Tom's cabin, it was fiction which suggested a blueprint for how the hopelessly dorky might someday find happiness with like-minded geeks.
For those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, though, and who were of that small fraction of the population who were in on the ground floor of the digital revolution, as it transformed from lawless frontier to settled territory, Coupland's book was like a flag waving for a country which we hadn't quite known we were citizens of. These days, of course, absolutely everyone is online, everyone plays video games, and everyone can craft a little subculture off and away from the popular centrist monoculture offered by Big Media. But back in the 80s, that kind of thing got you labeled a nerd, a geek, an outcast and loser. Given the fact that, outside of sci-fi cons and dial-up BBSs, most of this nerdism was solo activity, it could feel at times like you were the only geek on the planet. This was not a good thing.
What Coupland did was really suggest, for pretty much the first time, that there were now enough nerds in the world, and enough ways to connect them through shared interests and personality traits, to form communities of their own. Microserfs is fiction, but like Uncle Tom's cabin, it was fiction which suggested a blueprint for how the hopelessly dorky might someday find happiness with like-minded geeks.
