The first book I read this summer is Feed by
M.T Anderson. This book is set in the future where Internet connections feed
directly into the brain through a small chip placed in the users head. In this
book the world has changed a lot! All houses are surrounded by domes and have
their own artificial sun, and there are literally no forests left in the world.
Also, they have air factories that create oxygen! Almost nothing is like it
now! This was a strange, yet still very interesting book. Feed really
makes you think about the future of technology and what really could be
possible.
The question that
I thought about all throughout the book is if I would want the feed or
not. There are a lot of pros to buying
the feed, because you can look up anything you need to, anytime you want! The
feed turns you into a genius, with all the knowledge of the whole Internet!
Also, it’s a built in cell phone, you can chat with your friends using the
feed. On the downside, the feed is also pretty dangerous. In the book, the main
characters get hacked by a man they saw when they were vacation on the moon
(yes, on the moon). The man managed to hack into their feed making them under
his control! After a trip to the
hospital everything turns out okay for most of the characters, but one
character, Violet has permanent damage to her feed. Since the feed is connected
to her brain, the damage can cause her to lose mobility in parts of her body,
and even impair her speech. So, while I think it would be cool to have the
Internet with me at anytime, I would want to be safe and keep away from the
feed. Not to mention that people with the feed are constantly being bombarded
by ads from websites trying to sell you their products. I don’t even like
watching ads on TV! I think it would be really annoying having them in my head
all the time. So, for now I think I’m okay carrying around my IPhone to text
and look things up on the Internet!
Also, throughout the book I thought about if I
would want to live in the way that the characters do. Some parts of the future are pretty cool! For
example, it’s normal for people to take vacations to the moon or even to other
planets! They’ve even invented flying cars! But, with all of this cool stuff,
there are also some downsides. In Feed
you cant even go to the beach with out wearing a protective suit to protect
your skin from the toxins! That wouldn’t work for me, because I love to go to
the beach! There was one point in the book where the characters Titus and
Violet went to a filet mignon farm. I was expecting a lot of cows roaming
around, because that’s where filet mignon comes from. I was shocked when the
author described the farm as hedges of red meat with tubes running through
them, bringing blood to the meat. Where are the cows? The book even went on to
say that there was a steak maze for visitors to go through. To me, this sounds
un-appetizing! The people in this book cant even enjoy nature at all, because
there is none left! There are no trees or flowers. Every house, neighborhood,
and store has to be surrounded by a dome to protect from Earth’s real
atmosphere! So, while the flying cars and advanced space exploration is really
cool, I want the world to stay how it is now! I want to be able to go outside,
and plant flowers, and eat steak from a real cow, not a genetically mutated
meat hedge.
So as you can
see, the futuristic setting of this book is really interesting! I was shocked
on how simple things like trees, and even cows were pretty much gone! I thought
about what people would do if their feed just stopped working. At school, the
kids don’t even learn about math or language arts, most kids cant even read!
All students learn about at school is how to use and operate their feed,
because their feed can give them all the knowledge they need. I wouldn’t want
to be so reliant at technology, because it could always break or stop working.
So, overall I think that the world we’re living in now is better than the
futuristic world that M.T. Anderson writes about. With that being said, Feed
was still a really good book! Next, I think I’m going to read Hotel on
the Corner of Bitter and Sweet! J
~Savannah Kingery
