Hey M.T Anderson lovers... Today I'll be talking about one of his books, Feed!!! Well, I honestly can tell why you guys like him so much since he focuses on different ideas and issues in his books such as Consumerism and technology. I personally love how this story is brought to us from a teenager's point of view. Even though he expresses himself different than us, we can still understand what he's trying to say. This fascinating book reveals a futuristic American culture that is literally entirely dominated by advertisement and corporations that are working with brain implants. mmm, How crazy is that huh?
I know there are plenty of issues going on in this book but right now I would like to start off by focusing on one idea/issue: CONSUMERISM...For those of us who read this book already, we can say that it takes place in a near-future world and in this fascinating world media is literally always with you. The feed is implanted in people's brain. I don't think I would like that but okayy..
I have a confession to make.. I am absolutely obsessed with social media, I check Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr every two seconds to make sure I know everything that's going on in my friend's life. LOL, I know it's probably normal nowadays to do that but for Titus and his friends, that was basically nothing! Idk if this is like insane for you guys or nah but the world Titus and his friends live in sounds so interesting but then so scary. I won't lie... I would like to live in their world at least for one day just to see and experience what they have to deal with on a daily basis. They explain how they were so used to games, ads, information, directions feeding them directly into their brains and when the hacker made their feed go crazy, the world just simply didn't make sense to them anymore. They didn't know how to act or how to just talk and communicate like we do.This malfunction that the hacker caused made them stay on the moon for many days and they felt as if they were gonna go crazy... I would.. since they said the moon was boring...
There are crazy things going on in the book since everything is focused on consumerism. Titus may be clueless, but Violet actually teaches him that this kind of consumerism is destroying him, his friends and his family. Violet's resistance and then her death exposed or showed that there was no point or reason on trying to resist their society's dominant culture which in this case was the feed. why get rid of something that was helping them? that was Titus mentality at this point.
In the book, we can see how in the future most of the teenagers don’t really worry or care about their own level of intelligence and how the feed made them completely ignorant. Education is not really important to them anymore because the feed can help them find any type of information they want at any time. Everything is so much easier with the help of the feed. Is like having google in your hands all the time... I mean we already do because most of us have smartphones... so...
Idk if this is crazy to you guys but..Its crazy to me that most of them only worry about having a good time and consuming anything that comes up in their feeds. like seriously our lives are not easy like that.. life is just not that simple.They believed the feed would make them “supersmart without ever working. (Anderson 42)
In my opinion, it is the lack of work that makes them so freaking stupid. we can see the difference in Violet because she is homeschooled and the feed was implanted in her brain when she was seven years old so she was older compared to everyone else. She had time to learn and think on her own without the feed and she liked it more that way. She demonstrates to be smarter than Titus and his friends.
The moral of the story is that the more we rely on technology and other objects to think and make decisions for us, then the more ignorant we will become and our lives will be as fake and superficial as Titus and his friends.
The main thing that makes the society so superficial and ignorant is the consumption of products that are constantly being advertised in the feed in their brains. When we think about the feed we can imagine one of those websites where a lot of windows of ads show up and are so freaking annoying. Ok so now Imagine having that inside your brain all the time; How would we all end? with all those constant advertisement influences? Titus and his friends are a result of this giant issue.
So basically what I want you to understand from this blog is that the futuristic society described and explained in this novel is fucked up due to how people over the time turn out to be completely manipulated by consumerism. The feed is exactly what makes this manipulation possible and as a result, people cannot think on their own and they also have no idea of the damages that the feed is doing to them and that's just sad. The feed controls their brains completely and im honestly scared of having a future like Titus reality!! OMG that deadass terrifies me.
This book actually helps the people of today because it will make us more aware of how technology is literally making us slaves to consumerism and it's disgusting. M.T Anderson did an amazing job by exposing his ideas and issues that he sees in the world. This way maybe enough people will get the message and will interfere by not letting the feed become a reality in the future since this would obviously end our lives and the lives of our loved ones.
-Melissa F.
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