Time & Perspective Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland nails the cruel sequencing of televised attention: the viewer appraises you the way they appraise a product, scanning packaging before considering function. Hair, skin, clothes - each detail is a proxy for class, race, gender, age, health, and desirability. By the time language arrives, the segment is over, not just literally but cognitively; the audience has already filed you into a category and moved on.

The wit is in the rhythm. The sentence piles up mundane checkpoints with the inevitability of an assembly line, then snaps shut with that deadpan punch: "you're off the screen". It doubles as a technical fact of television editing and a social fact about modern visibility. TV is a medium built for faces and surfaces, and Coupland is pointing out how it trains us to treat people as fast-loading thumbnails. The line also carries a quiet accusation: if you want to be heard, you must first be "read" correctly.

Context matters. Coupland, the patron novelist of late-20th-century brand culture, is less interested in vanity than in mediation: how identity is translated, compressed, and sold. His subtext is that television doesn't merely reflect superficiality; it manufactures it by rewarding instant legibility and punishing complexity. In that economy, speaking well isn't the main skill. Looking like the kind of person worth listening to is.