Feed: M.T. Anderson

Book Title: Feed
Author: M.T. Anderson
Publisher: Candlewick Press


Media Format: Book
Genre: Sci-Fi, Dystopian, Satire, Shocker
Selection Source: ALA Best Books for Young Adults; 2003 (among many others)
Recommended audience age: Mature Young Adults; strong language, sexual situations, complex themes
Reading Recommendation : 5
Curriculum Connections: Sociology, leisure reading

The only thing worse than the thought that it may all come crumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.----Violet

Summary

Feed captures the experience of a teenager named Titus and his relationship with a girl named Violet in a futuristic world where the internet has morphed into a chip inserted into our brain giving us access to the feednet. The feednet is not drastically different from the internet we are used to. People can use it to look up information, chat with their friends, watch videos, and shop. Furthermore, corporations can use it to track consumer behavior in order to target adds to people based on their shopping patterns and thoughts.

Titus is a relatively typical American teenager. He's had the feed implanted for as long as he can remember, and he's relatively content (in a perpetually discontented consumeristic fashion) with his and his friend's lifestyle. Violet on the other hand, had a much more experimental upbringing. She did not have her feed implanted until she was well into childhood, and she was home schooled by her eccentric father rather than attend school ™. She is thus conflicted by her desire to have a normal life with her ability to look at the current state of affairs with the critical eye of an outsider. Titus's feelings for his new girlfriend see-saw between superiority and inferiority as he

is impressed by the breadth of her archaic knowledge, but finds her inability to fit in with his friends to be her own fault, because she's always showing off.

The real story in Feed, is how information technology is shaping the characters. While people have access to infinite quantities of information, their vocabulary has devolved in a manner reminiscent of the movie Idiocracy, where parental figures and even the president regularly make use of the words "ass" and "dude." Also, the speed at which trends change the girls changing their hairstyles multiple times in the same night, and sometimes trends from earlier eras catch up to the current era confusing the feed and freezing it. Most importantly, the feed keeps everyone looking for the next best thing, so they are unable to see how the world is collapsing around them.

Evaluation

I once heard Cory Doctorow say something like science fiction should be read to understand the technology of the era in which it was written, not to understand the technology of the future. I think that's what is so compelling about Feed. It's not warning us about some future that might happen, it's about letting us know what is happening right now. It's about the difficulty of living an authentic existence in an environment in which we are constantly being told that we are unwhole or unhappy, and if we buy this product we will be just a little bit closer to becoming that complete person.

Feed should only be recommended to the mature YA reader. It uses a lot of strong language, and just as importantly, it offers complex social criticisms that not all young adults will be able to make sense of and integrate into their own world view, but for the young adult who is ready, YA fiction doesn't get much better or relevant than this.