Feed

This is a little bit late, since I wanted to make sure that I had thoroughly gotten through M.T. Anderson's Feed before making comment on it here. In class, we had discussed a lot of what was included in the text -- the lesions, the ubiquitous advertisements, and the disturbingly internal workings of the feed itself for this group of teens -- but what interested me more, and I think speaks a little more loudly is what is not included in the futuristic text.

In a form that runs counter to most forms of literature, there is not one physical description of any character presented in this text that gives their body any individuality or marking apart from the crowd, which I think is extremely important for many of the themes that the feed speaks to. Never is weight, physique, eye color, hair color, etc. brought up -- it seems as though all of these differences are erased. Additionally, in the scenes that describe physical activity between characters, the body's movements are described very mechanically, perhaps an ode to the fact that a machine (the feed) has become so central to their lives.

This oversimplification of the individual seems to be one of the main concerns held by Violet and her parents. They are allowed to have a greater awareness of this problematic issue due to their distance from the feed, as Violet reaches the point that she wishes that it could just be shut off.

It was also notable, to me, that none of the traditional "markers" that go beyond simply Aryan-centric features have also been excluded from Anderson's text, and this reflects the society that they live in. Only briefly is a gay character mentioned (one of the teen's grandfathers), and never is a difference in race discussed, perhaps suggesting that these individuals have been further pushed to the margins as the feed introduced a greater social divide between the haves and have-nots.

As depressing as some of these issues are, sadly, I'm not sure how far our world is from the world of Feed. Although I think it is an overexaggeration to say that we are destined to a similar societal structure within the next 50 or even 100 years, I think it's certainly worth thinking about and drawing a lesson from it. What happens when these machines shut down? How far will we allow these feeds to go in becoming internal to ourselves and our bodies? Where do we draw the line between the corporation, the government, and the individual? These are all questions we will be facing more and more in the near future, and I'm not sure that we're really ready to answer them.. I'm not even sure how I'd begin to answer them.