Review for Feed

Feed was an interesting story. I honestly just plucked it at random off the shelf at the library. It's by MT Anderson. He himself doesn't describe the book as a futuristic novel or a science fiction, but rather... " I think of it more as a novel that uses images from an imagined future in an almost allegorical way to discuss things we're dealing with now."

Basically everyone has some little computer chip implanted in their head called a feed. It's a direct connection to the media through their brains. It channels things like ads, music, movies, everything.

I think this was a pretty cool book because it was written in first person and he speaks with a funny dialect that uses "like," "shit," "meg," (as in mega) and "unit" in every paragraph. It was cool, though, and once you got used to it it made sense. The dialect also fits in with his whole imagined future thing, because it's sort of an exaggerated way of how teenagers speak now. It took me forever to figure out what "unit" meant, though, and I'm still not sure. Dude, maybe? I dunno.

But Anderson's whole reason for writing this was to try and show us how we're being manipulated by the media. He says,

"Many people are quite frank about wanting to avert their eyes from the possibility that the world is a complicated place, one in which we all have a rseponsibility and a role to play. For example, a kid I know was talking about his vacation in Mexico. He said, 'It was just so poor down there. Basically you just had to not think about it -otherwise your brain would explode.' That's indicative of our attitude. Another quote I ended up using in the book, in a changed form, came from a teacher friend of mine: in a class discussion about England, a kid said, 'Yeah, I went to England. It was stupid.' I mean, it's a whole country! To me, that's a very dangerous American attitude: insularity. We can only become responsible citizens of the world once we start to acknowledge that there's a complex world out there that's not easy to assimilate."

Powerful and above all very thought provoking. I do recommend this one.