Last weekend, I finished reading Feed by M.T. Anderson for the second time. I thought that it would be pointless for me to read the book again, but as it turned out, I did miss some very key elements of the storyline and the metaphorical underlay of the book. In my opinion, Feed is a very well- written book, but that is not to say I feel it is 100% correct in its assessment of the threat of digitization. The brilliant part of the book, is not that Anderson uses dense and deeply buried allegories to make a point about today's society, because the book is not dense. The book is very thinly disguised as a story about the future, but it is quite obvious that it was intended to be about the current world. That is what makes this book so good. The fact that almost anyone can read it and recognize the point which he tries to get across is why the message in Feed is so strong.
Reading the book, however was not a fun experience. I didn't like reading a book which was geared to make you hate the society and the characters because of what deplorable people they were, when in fact those people are us, and that society is the one we live in today. So pretty much, this book made me a little angry at myself, which frankly I didn't like.
A few weeks ago, Andy had posed the question; "What does it take for a person to stop certain behavior?". Everyone gave answers (including myself) which were pretty standard such as, "when the person wants to", or "when the person is afraid of the consequence of their actions". After reading Feed, I realized that people change their actions only when they see somebody else doing the same thing, and they react to it negatively, causing them to reflect on their own actions. I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that since I re-read Feed, I cut down my time on Facebook and iChat to about 30 minutes a day combined. I was so disgusted by the ignorance that Titus and his friends displayed that it made me slightly disgusted by my own networking and chatting behaviors.
To an extent, Feed is on point, it does accurately depict our current teenage lifestyle in America (and any other industrialized country for that matter), keeping in mind that the plot is an allegory which is an intentional exaggeration of present day digital use. In class, I was discussing the part of the book where Titus' father tells Titus and Violet that the forest was clear cut to make space for an "air- factory" which was to be built. This of course was a little bit of dark humor about the fact that forests are natural air factories themselves. Marco continued with this thought, and made a really interesting comparison between the air factories and the idea of synthetically breeding livestock to produce more meat, something which we learned last year in out food unit.
Largely, I felt that the main issue of Feed was that Anderson took a really radical and almost hateful position against America, and against teenagers. Anderson discredits himself a little bit because he focuses solely on America as the supercharged consumer nation which is causing planetary destruction; a less than scholarly approach in my opinion. I felt as if Anderson had a sense of self-riotousness and condescending assurance that what he is saying is the "real" truth.
I want to close out this assignment by stating a few of my concerns about reading Feed for this class. Mainly, in books such as Feed, which reveal social behaviors to people for the first time, their tends to be a "bible effect" if you will. What I mean is that people see such texts as something holy and accept that as truth. Let me be clear, FEED IS NOT THE TRUTH. It is a biased look at a growing UNIVERSAL problem. If anything should be taken from this, it's that we should value life, and take care of our planet, but not hate ourselves for the lives we lead. Books like this one omit specific things for certain [intended] reasons. While I don't know what the reasons Anderson had for deciding that China with its lack of labor, trade and pollution regulations should have no responsibility as a destructive nation in his story is beyond me.
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Jakob,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this post.
Eloquent, despite some funny errors ("self-riotousness").
I think your starting assumption is something like, "If anything too basically criticises me or my life or my dearly-beloved symbols than it must be wrong." I'm pretty sure that is a (in your word) universal human idiocy - that we hold ourselves as basically good, allowing only minor criticisms of ourselves to come through our defenses.
That this assumption offers limited value becomes evident when one considers slave-owners, Indian-killers, and Nazis.
Perhaps that is also a lesson we should learn from other people - to, as the Jewish sage Yeshua ben Josef memorably suggested, "Take the log out of your eye."