Summary Of Player One By Douglas Coupland

Information doesn’t define humanity, but the way in which humans process it does. Some may say that “you can have information or you can have a life, but you can’t have both”, however I argue that life is the result of humans processing information in any way. Indeed, the tension between life and information comes from the two concepts of polarized meanings: information is surface level data whereas life is the way we react to information. Yet the two can (and do) ultimately coexist within humanity. In Player One: What will Become of us by Douglas Coupland, this notion is reinforced by Karen’s internal dialogue of what makes us life, and Rachel’s experience of living as someone who intakes information differently. Humans are not comprised solely

Rachel’s character in the afterlife further supports the idea that life isn’t decided by an individual’s personal approach to information. In Eternity, Rachel is still Rachel, except she no longer is affected by her mental disorders. If she was really just a vessel of information with no life, then she wouldn’t have a soul that was transported to the afterlife. Since information by itself lacks human qualities, Rachel would have to have actually been “someone not even human” (Coupland 30) in order to have not reached the afterlife at all. Rachel, with her new ability to understand metaphors and nuances, even comments on the informational factors that help form personalities, likening personality to “slot machine” (Coupland, 2009) where traits or tendencies are selected for you. Yet she grasps that “it’s real people at the end of all these variables, not androids.” (Coupland 209-210), and that these informational variables only serve as the building blocks for structures of what our lives will be. The interplay between information and life is a fundamental aspect of human existence explored in Douglas Coupland's Player One: What Will Become of Us.