Homework 12 - Feed A

When M.T Anderson wrote the book Feed, he meant it to be an allegory of the modern day teenage life. He didn’t want readers to think that he was capturing what he thought would happen in the future, more he wanted readers to see what our world is like right now. I do believe that Feed is on target because it perfectly captures the life of a teenager in our current period of time. While reading this book, I realized that the Feeds in the character’s heads represented the technology we teenagers use. Even if we do not have a chip in our head generating information for us whenever we need it, we do have cell phones and computers that can retrieve information with the click of a button. In a way, we are always connected to technology, like the characters in Feed are. People might argue that we do not have our digital devices on us 24/7, which are true, but everywhere we go we are faced with a source of technology. Whether it be the cell phones in our pockets or the iPods attached to our ears, we are practically always connected in one way or another. Everywhere we turn, we see representations of technology, whether it be the huge televisions in Times Square or the moving advertisements on television screens on our local city buses or taxis. We can’t escape from this technological oppression, even in our own homes.

There are also a lot of parallels between the world the characters in Feed live in and the world we live in. For one, like I previously stated technology is everywhere. We cannot escape from digital devices, no matter how hard we try. Another parallel is on page 278, when Marty gets a Nike speech tattoo. After every sentence, he would say the word Nike. In our world, people wear clothes that advertise logos of companies. For example, two years ago, Jacara wore a white t-shirt that simply said Google on it. To her, it was just another shirt, but to the public, it was Google’s way of getting people to be their advertisement. People always look at each other’s clothes, and by putting logos on their attire, companies are creating walking advertisements. Another parallel is on page 191, when Quendy had fake lesions made in her skin. She cut up her skin in order to be more attractive to Link. These lesions are just like plastic surgery. People use plastic surgery as a way to make them more attractive to the people they are trying to impress. All though plastic surgery isn’t making huge cuts in your skin that ooze blood, it is chopping away your natural skin to replace it with artificial skin.

I believe that Violet’s character was the most interesting and influential character in Feed. Her character went against the Feed, and tried to get everyone else to see how bad the Feed was to them, but they did not believe her. She was the only one who was able to see that the Feed was ruining their lives, but nobody would believe her because they thought she was just crazy. People choose to believe what people tell them to believe, we don’t have a mind of our own. Corporate companies tell us to always buy the next best thing, because it’s always better then the last. No matter the price, people buy it, because we are told to. In our current day and age, we are mere puppets to the capitalists’ leaders of our society.