Saturday, January 31, 2009
Life in JPod
While reading JPod, I found it pretty easy to relate to the characters. The characters aren't the traditional characters found in most novels, but that's not to say they aren't realistic. in fact, the workers in JPod seemed to have genuine human traits rather than the typical ramped up and artificial traits found in a lot of literature. Coupland manages to capture the identities of several young adults in 2006. Although I've never worked in a video game production company, I did work at the opposite end of the process, video games sales in a toy store, and found the two are similar. The majority of discussions that occur in JPod and the r-zone sales counter have nothing to do with work itself. Whereas the JPodders talk about the creation of Ronald McDonald and Belgian keyboards, r-zoners talk about how utterly awesome The Dark Knight was and how the jelly balls in Orbitz were probably deadly leading to them being taken off the shelves. What I'm trying to get at, is that Coupland managed to both capture and target the mostly overlooked 'geek' niche. Like many twenty-somethings, Coupland's characters define themselves from the products they either use or avoid making them very realistic and easy to relate to.
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