Feed by M.T. Anderson is story set about one hundred years in the future. It follows the lives of a group of teens in a society where the internet (known as the feed) is a chip that is implanted into their heads and is with them every hour of every day.
You could ask anyone today what one of the main problems with my generation is and most would say our attachment to our phones. Many people try to argue but if you really think about it, it’s kinda true. From my own personal experience, almost everyone I know would never be able to live without their phones, Wifi, and social media for an extended period of time. I believe that one of the main ideas of Feed is how reliant we are on technology and how it interferes with our ability to socialize.
Reading this book to me back to trip I once took with my school. My last year of school, I was a senior mentor (an advisor for a group of freshman responsible for keeping them on track). As a requirement every year, all of the mentors had to go on a trip to a camp in the Poconos in order to acquire leadership skills. This seemed like an amazing trip but there was one catch: no cell phones allowed. As soon as we got on the bus, the supervisors confiscated our phones for the remainder of the three day trip.
Like most people my age, I was furious. I didn’t understand what they expected us to do all day without them. We couldn’t text, play music, take pictures or keep in touch with our friends back home. What were we supposed to do? This experience reminded me of when Titus first woke up in the hospital without his feed, after having it hacked at the nightclub. The text reads, “...so I was just lying there, and couldn’t play any of the games on the feed, and couldn’t chat anyone, and I couldn’t do a fuckin’ thing except look at that stupid boat paint,...” (49). Without his feed, there was like a void in Titus’ life that nothing else could fill. There was nothing to do that could satisfy him, like the feed could. The same goes for my friends and myself. Without our phones, we felt so disconnected from everyone and everything.
Like Titus and his friends, we used our isolation as an opportunity to have a new type of fun. Instead of sulking in our own misery, my friends and I decided to entertain ourselves through games, jokes, and storytelling and we enjoyed that time together a lot more than we had thought we would. When Titus was in the hospital with his friends, they had no other choice than to make up games of their own and create an alternate source of entertainment. Similarly to when the text read, “It was the beginning of a great day, one of the best days of my life. We all played the dart game, and we laughed and sang “I’ll Sex You In.” Everyone was smiling, and it was skip” (57). This puts an emphasis on the fact that you can really have a good time without being consumed by your own source of media. Without the distraction of our phones, we were able to get to know each other on a whole other level and make memories that might not have been as significant if we had them. Everyone was involved together in one group rather than individuals in their own, separate world.
With that being said, our disconnection did not last for long. One of the many traditions of this trips is that on the second night there is always a bonfire in the middle of the woods. Usually the teachers will have everyone sit around the fire and get to know each other even better. But the year I went that didn’t happen for one major reason: they gave us our phones back. About to ten minutes into the bonfire, our teachers came down holding a bin that held all of our phones. All of us stormed over to them like shoppers swarming a 50 inch flat screen TV on Black Friday. After getting a hold of our phones, everyone felt a widespread sense of relief, like Titus’s experience when he first go his feed back. “We were all starting to feel it good — We were dancing in it like rain, and we couldn’t stop laughing, and we were running our hands across our bodies, feeling them again,...” (71). Connecting back with their feeds was like a sensation for them that was next to pure bliss. My friends and I were elated, but that brings up an even bigger question. Could we really not go a full weekend with being connected to the rest of the world? Were we really missing out on something from not being able to check our Instagram and Twitter feeds every five minutes?
Even though getting our phones back felt like a blessing at the time, looking back on it now makes me see that it really took away from the entire experience. Traditionally, we were supposed to sit around the bonfire and share really intimate feelings. I had heard stories of years past where other students poured their hearts out to one another and gotten so much closer. Instead of sharing that moment together, we were all distracted by having our phones again, checking missed text messages and updating our Instagram feeds.. Even though we were all together, we all were in our own separate universe. I thought about this when reading about the party that Titus and Violet attended in Feed. While at this party, everyone was focused on their individual feed or collectively watching a movie. In the text it says, “I looked around me. Everyone was nodding their heads to music, or had their eyes just blank with the feedcast” (83). From the constant use of their feeds, the characters of this book lost on that social interaction with one another. The accuracy of this scene and my own experience isn’t even surprising.
With this book being set years ahead of our time, it’s easy to think that it does not relate to us. But in all actuality, M.T. Anderson wasn’t that far off. Many of us, not just teenagers, are so consumed by our own personal feeds. From this, we have lost out on a lost art of being able to communicate with each other without hiding behind our phones.
Anderson, M.T. Feed. Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2002
Print.
Brittany H. 
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