Feed

Anderson, M. T. Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2002. Print.

This book is about a dystopian future where corporations run the world, and people live hyper-consumerist life styles.  Nearly everyone is connected to the “feed,” which is essentially a network of advertisements, TV shows, webpages, social networking sites, text messages, and phone calls, all hooked up into people’s brains.  In this world, the feed has “revolutionized” many aspects of people’s lives, like education.  If you don’t know a word, you can instantly look up the definition just by thinking about it.  If you want to speak to someone, you can instantly message him or her with a single thought.  One major downside is that you receive ads for products at random times during the day.

But the book primarily follows Titus, a teenager who meets a girl named Violet on a spring break trip to the moon with his friends.  Most striking is the language Titus and his friends use.  Like 1984, people have thinner vocabularies, and thus lost the ability to express themselves clearly and effectively.  In addition to misbehaving in the average ways the teenage boys do, the book also showcases a drug problem in the future called “malfunctioning,” where people momentarily have ecstatic drug-induced experiences through feed technology.

In their trip to the moon, Titus and his group of friends are victims of a “terrorist” hacker who implants a virus-like problem into their feeds.  The police investigate, but for an extended period of time, Titus, Violet, and his other friends, lose their connection to the feed, and have a difficult time functioning without it.  Mostly they are incredibly bored, and cannot handle not watching a TV show, or not ordering some new product.  Their attention spans are pathetic. 

During this time, Titus develops a relationship with Violet, who we discover is someone who only became connected to the feed later in her life.  Violet’s parents are professors, and represent skepticism that the feed is necessarily a good thing.  We find out, however, that Violet’s feed connection has a problem, in part because her brain was too far developed by the time she had the feed connection implanted.  But this also gives Violet a unique perspective; she’s an outside who still values many simple things, e.g. like being out in nature, that someone born on the feed wouldn’t understand.

Spoiler alert: All the while, Titus and Violet begin to see each other more, but then Violet learns that her condition is much worse than originally thought, and she is going to die relatively soon.  Titus callously removes himself from the situation, and even blocks and deletes important messages that Violet sends to him.  In the end, she dies, and, at the insistence of Violet’s father, Titus goes to see her body.  Following this, he seems to become somewhat more skeptical of the feed, and vows to keep Violet’s memory alive.

Feed is undeniably an important novel, and I think it should be taught, and I will very likely teach it someday.  In fact, I am currently writing an unit plan in EDUC 463 that uses Feed as a fulcrum text.  I decided to create this plan mostly because of this novel.  In essence, the unit belongs to a longer yearlong plan designed around the philosophical question of the good life, and more specifically the unit covers human happiness and what it means to be happy in the 21st century. 

The book's central themes of the degeneration of human thought and language, the over-reliance on technology, the psychology of consumerism in a society run by capitalism, and the easy escape of "malfunctioning," drug-like experiences, I think, force students to consider what makes them happy and why, and further, how these things contribute to (or take away from) who we really are.  This is because the future world portrayed in Feed is not all that different from our own.  We can text and message each other instantly (and often poorly), we already completely depend on our computers or smart devices to get through the day, we are constantly bombarded with advertisements and commercials, and many people choose to drink or do drugs to escape from the realities of 21st century life in America.  What more relevant questions are there for high school students to ask and mull over?