Feed

by M.T. Anderson

M.T. Anderson, who won the National Book Award for his book The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing set during the Revolutionary War, was ahead of his time with this novel, published before iPods were all the rage, and when cell phones were just becoming popular. In the not-so-distant future,  teenage narrator Titus, like all of his peers, has a “feed,” an Internet/television hybrid that is directly hardwired into his brain, and corporations send constant messages through the information stream. When Titus travels with his friends to the moon for spring break, he meets home-schooled Violet, who thinks for herself, and calls into question everything he had accepted about his life. Violet points out that the feed is a ceaseless source of seduction, for entertainment and consumption. The novel brilliantly combines staples of everyday  teen life (such as parties and shopping malls) with inventive and not-so-farfetched fantasy twists. Private "chats" flow from mind to mind; people go "mal" (short for "malfunctioning") in contraband sites that intoxicate by scrambling the feed; and, after Titus and his friends develop lesions, ads and sit-coms tout lesions as the latest hot trend. Each chapter highlights excerpts from the feed to give readers an inkling of the media barrage to the brain. Can Titus fight the system that wants to control his brain? Or is it easier just to go along? This satire raises searching questions for teens about how and when they receive information, and the dark side of an advertising- and media-dominated society.