Feed
13 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: future, science fiction, The Way it Could Be
Feed by M.T. Anderson
Published by Candlewick Press, Cambrides: 2002
298 pgs.
Recommended reading age: 13 and up
VOYA Rating: 3P, 3Q, S
This is a futuristic tale about teens that has a lot of clever underlying social commentary going on within a story of teen rebellion. So what is a feed? A feed is something that gets implanted into a person’s brain and is like having online chat and Internet on in your brain 24/7. There is no need for an actual computer. You just simply need to use your feed for anything that you need. The feed is aware of the person’s searches and Interests. It can pick up on other trends or things that might interest the individual based on their previous purchases or searches. (In fact it isn’t all that far away from what happens now on your Facebook or MySpace accounts when you allow access to various applications on your profile…)
Titus and his friends are going to the moon for a fun vacation. They are doing what all teens do: Relishing in self-gratification, partying and enjoying their privileged lives and using their feeds to communicate and keep up with modern trends. Well, they are doing what MOST teens do. Some teens that maybe have a little less money or with parents who aren’t as accepting of the technological advances that are the latest rage aren’t so lucky. Some teens, based on their income level and their parents, have older feeds that are maybe unreliable. Violet is one of these less privileged teens using a slightly older model. Violet has a father who also is a bit resistant to the present day technological use and you can see this resistance show up in Violet a bit too. In an attempt to see how the “normal” teens live, Violet decides go to the moon too where she starts out merely observing Titus and his friends but quickly the group winds up connected. While all attending the same club, a hacker hacks into the group’s feeds and they are all confined to a hospital for days while the government, medical and technical professionals monitor and repair their individual feeds.
Eventually they leave and everyone thinks their feeds will be fine. Titus and Violet slowly start up a relationship and begin dating. Violet begins to play games with the feed and tries to trick it by going crazy and busying all different types of goods as way of messing with the system. She begins to “resist the feed”. You later find out that Violet’s feed was never quite the same after the hack and slowly, bit by bit, her feed starts to “die” and malfunction. Soon Titus and Violet are left knowing that eventually she will die and try to live their teen lives using what time they have left together.
This is very interesting because it touches on things in society today that sometimes doesn’t feel all that far away in the near future. Teens can relate to this super-cool open line of constant communication but the story then shows consequences to being constantly hooked into the feed. Some characters start to form these lesions on their bodies over the course of the book. When more of them start popping up on people then the feed starts to broadcast that these lesions are actually “in” and “hip” as way of covering the fact up that they may actually be side effects to having the feed implanted in your brain. At one point, in a desperate attempt to get noticed, one character gets these totally ridiculous and ugly lesions artificially made so that she is the hippest of them all. It reminds me of other fads and trends that teens embrace today such as tattoos, piercings, hair cuts and fashion. How far would teens today go to stay fresh, cool and fit in? What price would teens today pay for not following the fold and for resisting this conformity? All these questions make this a very relatable story for teens. It has a little romance, a little teen angst and a lot of political and social commentary for the above average teen reader.
It is a very smart book with subtleties that might be picked up by the right teen reader. It isn’t a sci-fi thriller with lots of action. The dialog is very intriguing and interesting and uses lots of futuristic made up words. You can tell that as the characters are speaking to each other in real life they are also using the same abbreviated language that they would be using if they were chatting online. The characters gradually seem to get “dumber” with their words as the novel develops. Sometimes the meanings for certain words even seem to change over the course of the book, indicating that words and trends are almost arbitrary in actual meaning and really just depend mostly on the feed. The story is extremely dependent on the relationships between the teens and their dialog rather than action and adventure. I loved the language and conversations that were presented by M.T. Anderson and felt they would ring true to teen language and would be very relatable. I think this would be more for the serious reader who is a little older. Anyone under 13 might be too bored and have trouble with the language and all the nuiances to the vocabualry.
The cover was interesting and effective. By showing a bald head with a nondescript face to it, the person could be any male teen living during that time. The words of the novel are faintly plastered across the cover which is reminiscient of the way the feed is always on, and always reacting.
