Tolog Review: Feed

Feed
by M.T. Anderson
reviewed by Silin Chen

Titus is an average teenager of his time: attending School™, having to deal with an annoying brother, hanging out with friends and shopping over his feed are all his daily activities. That is, until he met Violet—a girl that he came across when hanging out with his buddies on the Moon. She is unlike any other girl he ever met: beautiful yet not brainless, home-schooled within her own little community group and by her father, and most importantly, her attitude towards the feed is different.

Violet is always the one who stuck out when Titus hangs out with all his friends—in Titus’ words, she was the one who watched and observed, but never participated. Although she had the feed just like everybody else, she was not as reliant on it; she only first acquired her feed when she was seven. She knows how to mess the feed up and actively resisted it, and without the constant bombardment of the feed on her mind, Violet displayed many insightful opinions on events and is more aware of modern issues than Titus. They eventually grew close to each other, until he considered even to engage in a romance with her, when both their feed systems were hacked by resistant organizations. During the recovery Titus had no problem at all to make his feed function normally, but Violet, due to her model being cheap, old and installed too late, did…

The story in this book, Feed, is greatly centered around this one futuristic device with the same name as the title. The feed is a chip installed in a persons body, programmed and tied into one’s nervous system so that it can be commanded through thought. You can now watch TV shows, play games, shop, chat and do a million other things just by opening your eyes with the feed. And it keeps track of your shopping history, eventually painting out a consumer preference picture, so the right kind of advertisement can be chosen specifically for you—in general, the feed makes everybody’s lives better and easier. Or so the majority thinks.

What really struck me in this book is how scary it is when I go back and think about it in depth. Though this is set in a future era that may not happen at all, our modern society is somewhat reflected in it. The hub concept, the feed, is something our internet, tablets, computers and phones are today; we are relying on them more heavily than ever before and that reliance is only increasing, yet with so much information that the internet stuffs us with, how can we be sure we will not turn into someone like Titus? 

In the book, Violet’s father told a story about when he did not have a feed and was mocked behind his back by interviewers. He was seen as such an outcast, a grown man with no feed, and did not earn that job. What would our reaction be to somebody in this modern world who is completely ignorant with technology? Would we not laugh in disbelief?
Are we turning into the forerunners of those people with the feed in this book?