Prepare to Beam Aboard
Preparations for the Coupland list-ers meet was plotted out in emails on and off-list. We arranged to meet on the Friday prior to the reading around lunch time and then make our way to Borders @ Charing Cross. Most of these arrangements were planned out while I was distracted by flu and work deadlines so while I had suggested a venue to meet, The Hogshead Pub, I had never bothered to check out the link Anne had posted to an address and review of the pub. The day before the meeting I realised that the link gave an address to a totally different Hogshead. By this time the Coupland discussion group would now be off-line, traveling to London. I rationalised so long as there was a Hogshead on Drury Lane they'd find their way. Of all people we should be aware our physical space was not so important as the personalities that inhabited it. It was irrelevant as to which Hogshead we were in, providing we were all there and in conversation.
Unfortunately there is no Hogshead in Drury Lane. As Erik speculated later, that site had probably been set up by a rival Coupland list designed to foil our attempts to meet. The internet is not a good place if you already have a well developed sense of paranoia. I wandered back to the original pub I had intended us to meet. I had sent textual directions instead of a map and an address, describing the location as near Chinatown, close to the Prince Charles Theatre in a building which had once been the Hospital for Skin Diseases. I sat at a table feeling extremely foolish laying out some Douglas Coupland books on the table to tip off anyone who found the pub as to who I was.
The first three arrived. John and Erik from Copenhagen and Goncalo from Portugal. They recognised the titles and awkwardly asked if I was in town for the ...er.. Coupland thing. I guess they were having as much trouble categorising what we were doing as I was. Richard Fee, down from Harrogate arrived shortly afterwards and finally Anne from Manhatten tore in looking distracted but recognisable wearing a faux fur described in an early email.
Subsequent postings confirmed that we all felt curiously at ease. Conversations followed similar lines as our emails - Andy Warhol, Douglas Coupland's sexuality, Merits of Miss Wyoming, Goncalo's fetish for Radio Competitions, Anne's actor brother appearing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer... Several people posted that they had instantly recognised group members, although not from photos, they described the sensation of recognising somebody they already "knew". I felt comforted that we had found and recognised each other using in the main textual descriptions rather than practical things like addresses, directions and photographs.
This possibly was the moment where virtual embodiment
and physical embodiment merged. The comfortable sensation for everyone
was not unexpected. In terms of the Turing test, it seems, we'd all
guessed right.
The Coupland Moment
In truth for me there were actually four "Coupland Moments". There were two earlier dress rehearsals. The first was the Barnes and Noble on line interview, where I felt a form of contact had been made. I'd also attended Coupland's earlier Finchley Road reading. This was his first UK appearance and he had posted the day before he was jet lagged and exhausted. When I reached the front of the queue for the signing he did strike me as extremely lackluster. I had brought a care package of chocolate covered coffee beans, absolut vodka, a copy of Jessica Mitford's Hons and Rebels and a copy of my own novel #note 1 .
I was feeling extremely foolish (okay I was feeling like a groupie). For me the one to one chat over the books he was signing was less like meeting Douglas Coupland than the reading itself. I suggest this is something to do with my notion of Coupland being tied into his author persona. The one-to-one chat over the books produced an anxiety, because it did not fit within this author persona, whereas the reading did.
I was also slightly embarrassed about the ego trip of presenting the man with a copy of my own novel. He seemed pleased with the gift and asked if there was an address to send a thank you letter. This unnerved me. Partly because I felt for a second our roles were reversed. The feedback loop perhaps. It was like the Barnes and Noble on-line interview. I was not used to two way contact. I muttered something about checking his web page, returning our "relationship" back to one with screens between us. When I later checked the web page there was no mention of the gift and since every second person had been bearing gifts like wise men it struck me that this was not surprising. It was reassuring in that it was consistent with our on-line relationship. I would plug into Coupland's life. I did not expect him to plug me into his.
The 3rd March reading had a different feel to it, because of the participation of the other list-ers. This time I was seeing our-Douglas Coupland, not the Douglas Coupland I had created. We arrived early at Borders and took up position near the front. Jeremy The Insider from Harper Collins appeared, instantly recognised by Anne. Most of the Coupland list had brought notebooks and were taking notes. Several took photographs. Erik pointed out a guy with a sophisticated digital recorder. Somebody behind murmured, "That's definitely going on the web page". It seemed to me that a lot of the audience were there to see an incarnation from Coupland's web-diary and were altering their perception of the environment to make the physical world as close to the digital world as we could. This is the reverse of the goldfish and bowl scenario Clyne's uses.
After the reading we queued up for a book signing along with about 200 other people. Several polaroids later (Brady Bunch shot on the stairs etc) we were next in line. We discussed whether we should approach en masse or one at a time. The consensus was to go up all together. We were also uncertain how to describe ourselves. Coupland stalkers? suggested Jeremy cruelly. I suggested we were a cyber-tribe and this idea was a little more popular, although it is questionable as to which was the more accurate.
When Coupland understood that most of us had traveled across the world for the reading he was happy to pose for photographs. We all muttered about how important his work was to us and on this occasion I felt less uneasy about the one-to-one contact. Probably because it was not really one-to-one, it was Coupland at the centre of the Coupland list-ers. Exactly how things had been for all those months on the list. The only curious moment for me was during a photograph when I found myself next to Coupland and posed with his arm over my shoulders. Again, there was an uneasiness because I had not constructed an interaction which included the physical. Balance felt restored when the polaroid developed and I could then replace the actuality with a representation of the moment. Framed in a Barbie world boundary.
We left the Borders venue in a slightly dazed way. Later Erik posted I'd commented he had been really cool about meeting his idol. He said in fact he felt slightly in shock. We all felt something had happened but it was not clear what the moment meant.
Strangely as we left, Coupland abruptly got up and disappeared to the other end of the room. From where I was standing I could see Jeremy's friend the Harper Collins publicist look unsettled. The person next in line looked confused. "Aw, we broke him," I said, as if he were a toy we'd played with too hard. We eventually decided he had probably been desperate to visit the bathroom and had decided to sign one more book and must have been horrified when seven of us went up at once.
We spent the weekend hanging out and Sunday the non-UK residents returned to their four corners and I sat down to try and analyse what the Coupland moment had meant. How did the physical meeting differ from virtual meeting. My analysis was interrupted by an urgent post from young Richard Fee - Oh my God check out Doug's diary NOW!
The Fourth Coupland Moment: http://www.coupland.com/tourdiary2000/eday08.html
Coupland's analysis seemed to touch on the meaning of the moment better than I could. For him it had been an intense moment of connection. We had experienced it to varying degrees, but probably not as intensely as he writes about it. For him the moment of physically connecting had more meaning than the virtual author/reader relationship. For a moment we had been humanised and connected as humans one to one.
With the disclaimer that my aftermath analysis is
probably intensely flawed, due to my involvement, these are the points
I drew from the Coupland experience:
My sense is that this is probably how more relationships will be initiated given the accessibility of digital technology and messaging software. I don't foresee that a virtual relationship would take precedence over a physical world relationship -at least for me, and I don't exclude the possibility this may change in a few years. The fact that we did meet in the physical world suggests that there is a driver towards completing a relationship with a physical world meeting and that this acts as a kind of validation of the interraction. However this is not uniformly the case. In Life on the Screen there are several case studies of role playing MUDers who have no wish to meet up in the physical world.
In conclusion then, I think the virtual Douglas Coupland was a cyborg and the meeting was a reuniting of physical and virtual embodiment. The moment was a human - or I think more accurately a post-posthuman moment. But a moment. William Gibson at a recent talk at the ICA which I attended and viewed on web-cam (I have not yet had an opportunity to merge the virutal and embodied Gibson) talked about how the internet means we can capture history more accurately. Multi histories like mult-dungeon and dragon games will be documented. I'm not sure I agree with this. Material on the internet is not permanent. However I agree that multi-presents can be documented briefly. Certainly the Coupland meeting has been captured on several web pages which often share the same images. The human moment exists in the past, the virtual moment has been rewritten and captured on the web. Coupland for me is returned to cyborg status and the Coupland group returns to virtual identities. I too am restored to my posthuman state as I type this essay and see the text form on the screen. The real human moment rewritten to a virtual moment, in blue on yellow.
"Sometimes I think that the only moments that
matter are those moments where you connect,
and everything else is filler and crap and drudgery.
I don't know."
Douglas Coupland
FOOTNOTES
Hons and Rebels - Coupland is a Nancy Mitford fan. Jessica Mitford's biography might have been of interest. My own book titled Left of Centre was published in 1994 by Secker and Warburg. Now out of print much to the relief of my parents and the Masterton Tourist Board
