Title: Feed
Author: M.T. Anderson
Genre: YA fiction, science fiction, Book Worms book club selection
The events in Feed take place in the future (year unnamed),
in a world where social media feeds are streamed through a chip inserted in the
brain (just imagine Facebook and Twitter constantly updating in your head). In
this world school and the clouds are trademarked because they are owned by
corporations. Education consists of learning how to use the feed to be the best
consumer. There are flying cars (called upcars) and neighborhoods consist of
tunnels instead of asphalt roads. The pollution is so pervasive that
neighborhoods are encased in giant bubbles and the local weather is controlled
by the neighborhood’s homeowner’s association. The world’s oceans are so
polluted that beachgoers have to wear special suits to protect themselves.
Not only does the feed constantly bombard the user with ads,
videos, and chat, but the feed also controls all the physiological functions of
the body (the reader doesn’t find this out until later in the book). Because of
this constant bombardment of information, peoples’ vocabularies and verbal
sentence structure are shorter and clipped-similar to a tweet. Teens refer to
each other as “unit” instead of “dude” or “hey, man” indicating that everyone
views themselves and others as a type of machine. When the feeds of Titus and
his friends are turned off after a hacking, at first they don’t know how to
entertain themselves and are easily bored. In this world no one reads physical
books and writing has become an obsolete skill. “Before that, they had to use
their hands and eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them
around outside of them, in their hands… that’s one of the great things about
the feed- that you can be supersmart without ever working” (47).
While Titus and his friends recover from their hacking,
Titus starts a relationship with Violet. Violet is different from Titus and his
friends- she didn’t receive the feed until she was six or seven, she learned to
write (gasp!), and her vocabulary and critical thinking skills are superior to
that of Titus and his friends (she is accused of showing off and using “weird
words” multiple times). Violet is also aware of the world outside of the feed
and is constantly mentioning world events in brief snippets to Titus and his
friends. Like most teenagers, they are unaware of the world and the bigger
picture. The readers gets quick snippets that all is not well in the world;
besides the pollution, there are rumors of war, riots, and an incompetent president
trying to keep it all hush hush.
It’s also quite creepy how prescient the author was in
regard to computers, cell phones, technology, and corporations’ seamless intertwining
in our lives. The book was written in 2002; Facebook didn’t launch until 2004, Twitter
in 2006, the iPhone was released in 2007, and Amazon and Google hadn’t tried to
take over the world yet. This was the first selection of the book club where I
work. After the hacking incident, we thought the direction of the book was
going to lean towards investigating the hacking and the people and politics
behind it, but it’s just a quick blip in these kids’ lives (like everything
else on the feed). We came to the consensus that the author focused more on the
teens than the hacking because that is how most teens (and adults,
unfortunately) view the world- they only pay attention to events and politics
if it affects them directly. This book prompted serious discussion about the
role and amount of technology in our lives along with the dangers of being a
passive consumer.
