Feed: Another Progressive Book

I just finished the book Feed by M. T. Anderson and I must say… “Wow”. The book is set in the near future, where cars can fly and teens can spend spring break on Io or the Moon. The most important technological advance that is prevalent throughout the book is the Feedware installed into children’s brains when they are very young. The Feed is something like instant wireless internet access…in your brain. You can look up information, shop for clothes, and even use instant messaging all in your head. The story follows Titus, a teen who meets a peculiar girl while vacationing on the Moon during Spring Break with his friends.

This book was one that I have to read for a class, but it was incredibly entertaining and riveting, and I had to get to the last page. For those of you not used to scifi novels, there may be a bit more time devoted to learning the kids’ lingo and understanding how everything is different in the future.

But the most important part of the book, as you can probably already tell, is the Feed.

The future portrayed in this novel is a scary one. Teens and adults alive have been rendered nearly illiterate and lazy due to the Feed. The culture they live in is wholly capitalistic, where everything is owned and trademarked through major corporations and you can’t go anywhere without an advertisement going on in your head. Even Cloudstm are a trademark. The Feed keeps people hardly aware of the war and sickness going on all around them.

The scariest part is how very well this book portrays today’s society. We live in a capitalist country, and everything must be done for monetary gain. Money is everything. Shopping is a sport. The media is everywhere and everything, and many times we can only think of the world in terms of what we’ve seen in movies or what the news tells us. “[Songs, movies, ads] are all images that are challenging us to be better consumers rather than better people,” says the author of Feed, M. T. Anderson.

Feed also effectively pokes fun at teens today who are so intent on following current trends and popular items. M. T. Anderson actually used the magazines Seventeen, Maxim, and Stuff for research. In the early part of the story, the popular item is a fake bird that does nothing, and the girls will often stop what they are doing to retreat into the bathroom and style their hair so they match the current style. The popular show on the Feed among teens is called simply, “Oh? Wow! Thing!”. I say this book does well at parodying our culture.

“I’m clearly in favor of trying to extend your knowledge into areas that are obscure and eccentric, as a way of exploring your self and your place in the world,” says the author. I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, I’ve even written a blog all about the importance of trying new things! My teacher used the phrase “direct your life” in class last week, and he also stressed the importance of trying new things and how this can expand you as a person.

I’ve rambled on long enough. Read the book. You may learn a few things.

EDIT: 3/30/08: I just remembered that I bookmarked a page in here that I thought was important to mention. Here is a direct 1984 reference:

When Violet is describing the mall, she says, "It's like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple." (pg. 97)

For those of you who've read George Orwell's 1984 you may have noticed the similarity between the simplifying of customer demand in Feed to the simplifying of the English Language in 1984.