Civilization and Feed Comparison

Jesse Russell 1/26/1007
B History

“Feed” in Comparison to Civilization Course

Feed By M.T. Anderson

This last semester in my civilization course we have learned about the ups and downs of our civilization, including how the world we live in constantly bombards us with advertisements and media, and how we actually have no perception of reality. In “Feed” by M.T. Anderson, based on our oncoming future, all humans have a chip implanted inside their brain known as a “feed”. The feed works as almost anything, a chat system, a television, a way to listen to music, and a way to receive information, such as advertisements. People are constantly being bombarded with ads in their feeds and into their brains. M.T. Anderson’s prediction of the future isn’t far off from our present.

Titus, a teenager and main character of the story “Feed”, travels to the moon with some friends, once there he meets a girl named Violet, suddenly everyone’s feeds get hacked and shut down. This is when Violet, Titus and his friends become good friends, and in the case of Violet and Titus, more than friends. Violet realizes how corrupt the feed is, and how everyone is practically being brainwashed, they no longer have to think for themselves. The feed includes a dictionary, calculator, internet, it practically has access to anything you need, you no longer have to find out where to stay on the moon. As soon as you arrive you are thrown hundreds of advertisements for hotels on the moon. Violet decides to fight the feed and the phenomenon of it that has taken over the World.

Today it is a statistic that the average person living in New York sees approximately 5,000 advertisements a day. If we lived today with feeds in our brains we would probably be getting an advertisement shown to us every second, even if we chose to ignore it, we would see it. The media is something that is constantly surrounding us and in this future world presented by Anderson it is even more so. Everything that we live in today isn’t necessarily reality, television is a picture of something that we don’t really see, radio is something that we don’t really hear, instant messaging isn’t actually talking. This way of living now isn’t far off from the “feed”, it’s almost the same just not quite implanted in our brains. The “feed” takes all this to a brand new and higher level, there is no longer any need for using your voice, you can talk to anyone instantly using the feed and so much more. There is hardly any use for having a brain.

There is a clear comparison between our “reality” on earth and the earth that Anderson portrays in his book. Hopefully we will be able to realize to use our brains more, before it gets to the stage of the “feed”.