Author: M.T. Anderson
Original Copyright Date: 2002
Backcover Description:
For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon — a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson creates a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire ushering us into an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.
My Thoughts:
Wow. That was a literary transition from Robert Louis Stevenson. I started Feed about 6 minutes after finishing the short story "Markheim" by the aforementioned Stevenson. The first page of Feed seemed to have, like, every other word, as like, ",like" or something. Of course that was on purpose. Feed is a cautionary tale about a society where the computers are linked directly to the brain at a very young age. Instead of being used for "good and betterment" it functions just like any computer does today. It is a vehicle for advertisements and social interaction. It is just like, you know, having Facebook(tm) in your head ALL THE TIME, you know...
The book is in the "young adult" section of the book store and I initially took the dumbed down language of the eighteen year old main character to be just that, the inner monologue of an eighteen year old. But, I quickly learned that everyone spoke, like you know, like that and tthat M.T. Anderson knew what he was doing.. Everyone spoke the same, you know language, from the president down to the janitor.
As I progressed through the book, I realized that there is a very deep subject here, and that is the dumbing down of the individual in the face of all the social media out there. It really struck close to home. In the world M. T. Anderson creates, every time a School or Cloud is mentioned it has a trademark symbol around it. In this world, schools are corporate subsidiaries and clouds are a product. Considering that this book was written in 2002, well before most of the social media addictions started, it hit very close to home.
The back cover description nailed it fairly well saying this follows in the footsteps of Orwell, Burgess and Vonnegut, but I would say the biggest shoe it is trying to fill is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
This was a really good book and I would recommend it to most anyone.
Every time I use an ad supported app I think of this book. It is scary how close we are to a feed...of course I am guilty because I never go anywhere without my iphone. YA is not what it was when we were young. I think it has some of the best writing out there of course it is the genre that makes the most money for publishers. I think that is why they can afford to publish some better writers and not so much James Patterson.
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