M.T. Anderson's Feed was one of my favorite books from the YA Lit course I took last year and I'm glad to have the opportunity to read it again this semester (especially because I realize I had missed a lot of the little details the first time!)
I love speculative fiction that makes us think about where we are and where we're going. I think Anderson's portrayal of the future is so powerful and thought-provoking because it reflects what people are already demanding from technology today. We want what we want when we want it and would prefer to have it all while expending as little thought and energy as possible. The "dumbing down of society" idea sounds cliche, but Anderson's story makes it, frighteningly, all too believable. Titus and his friends looking up words they don't know on their feeds reminds me of how many of us simply google a word instead of taking the time to look it up in a dictionary. And the way they programmed their up-cars and relied on the feed to tell them where they were made me think about how our reliance on GPS devices today makes us think so much less about our journeys when we get in our own cars now.
Information is not knowledge, but, sadly, it seems that many teens today often think cutting and pasting info from the Web shows that they "know" something. Such an attitude mimics Titus' thoughts: "That's one of the great things about the feed--that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now" (p. 47).
We all desire instant access to information and the convenience of portable computing devices. I'm sure we are, in a way, moving towards a more "Feed-like" world as far as this convenience and "connectedness" goes. But I truly can't imagine humans ever reaching a point where we would allow computers to be connected to us internally.
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Yes, I agree with your appraisal of Feed, and always want to ask (or do ask, I'm not afraid) what is all of this information for? Or why do we need all of this information. There is no answer for this question inside or outside of SCILS, but I think philosophically, as a society we should ask if all of this information is necessary. Also, does the technology drive society or society drive technology? I think technology has produced the results we see today...of course without a market this stuff would flounder.
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