The Future is Now

In the novel there is a piece of technology that is implanted into the brains of individuals called a Feed. The Feed plays an important role in this novel. The Feed is the characters way of thinking, entertainment, shopping, and even communicating. Essentially the Feed is in fact their way of life.  As we continue to read this novel we start to understand what it is and how it works. We also come to a conclusion that the Feed is a necessity to the characters in the novel. While reading this and coming to these conclusions I realized that we today aren’t as different from the characters in the novel from the distant future. The feed is to the characters what the internet is to us. The internet is a tool that we all use today. Most of us rely on the internet for the answers to most of our problems. Not only that but also for uses like entertainment, shopping, or communication, the Feed and internet are so alike it’s scary. Everything the Feed is used for in the novel is an exact reflection of for what the internet is used for in today’s time.

We may not have a feed that is attached to our brains today but most of us carry around cell phones and laptop throughout our day that have access to the internet. It’s not hard to get access to internet nowadays when there are places like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts that offer free Wi-Fi.  So, very much like the feed we walk around our entire day and spend countless hours surfing through the internet whether it be for entertainment uses which includes sites like YouTube or Netflix or communicating on social media on apps like Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram. Titus does make a reference to the internet in chapter 10 when he says “I don’t know when they first had feeds like maybe fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computer were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe. He’s admitting here that life without the feed would be pretty difficult for him. He couldn’t imagine a life without the feed, just like most of us can’t imagine a life without the internet.

The Feeds are implanted into the characters brains at birth. So they live with these things from the beginning of their life all the way till the end. We on the other hand weren’t born with the internet imprinted inside our bodies but we were born in an era where the internet imprinted itself on us. With that being said our births happened at a time when the internet had still been relatively young so we grew up to be influenced by the internet, which has pretty much taken over all of our lives.

The Feed has so much of an influence on these characters that it even changes the way they communicate to each other. They no longer use their mouths to talk to each other, they communicate straight off the Feed. This really reminds me of people nowadays. No one really talks to anyone anymore, most forms of communication mostly happen behind a screen through a cell phone. Even with communication through a cell phone no one even actually talks on the phone anymore, they just text one another just like the characters use M-chat each to communicate to each other. The characters even abbreviate words because they are too lazy to type them. Kind of like today when people use phrases like lol, smh, and lmao or even worse how they don’t actually spell words out and write “u” instead of “you” and “ur” instead of your or you’re. We may look at this novel and say were never going to end up like the characters but what we have all failed to notice is that we have already taken multiple steps closer to becoming just like them. The internet is our Feed, we carry it everywhere we go and most of us can’t live without it.

Ricardo, Prompt 4

Anderson, M.T. Feed. Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2002. Print