HW 12 - FEED A

I don’t think Feed necessarily misses the point but at the same time I think the book fails to really emphasize just how much not having the feed can affect you too. In a world that is completely taken over by technology – you are missing out on different sources of information and it will become much harder to connect to people as they are used to – as everyone else does. Now you may not think that it’s a bad thing but you have to think about situations like when Violets father was at the interview and the people interviewing him tried to chat him through the feed and he didn’t have it – they couldn’t take him seriously – he wasn’t up to date and was unable to connect with them on their level therefore he missed out on an opportunity. Things like that happen all the time. If you don’t have a cell-phone or email address etc, you miss out on many opportunities. In this world to stay connected you have to have at the very least an email address so that people can still get in contact with you – update you with new information, etc.

I guess I kind of see the parallels between Feed and our modern day teenage lives but in general I still feel Feed is way more exaggerated. Like the whole idea of the nice neighborhoods that pretty much can make the sun come and go whenever they want vs. poor neighborhoods that all share their uncontrolled days and nights. I feel like that might be a metaphor for how much easier life is for people who have money and how hard and ‘unexpected’ it is for people who don’t. How some things that don’t even matter to people who are well off, have a more valuable importance to those who are less fortunate. Or that’s probably not even the parallel for it – I don’t know.

Also the amount of marketing is ridiculous in the book. Anytime you think of something – you receive an advertisement for it, other things related to it or other items people look at who have previously looked at that item. The same thing goes for our society. Although we don’t have chips in our brains, we see advertisements everywhere we go – on billboards, transportation mobiles, cellphones, trains, tv, our computers, in music, on clothing, jewelry, etc. The feed is all around us and even on us.

I thought it was kind of ridiculous how in the book, they were all saying Coke a whole bunch of times to get free supplies thinking they were cheating the whole deal when really they just fell completely into it. It’s like now-a-days when people refer other people to things such as clubs of some sort they get discounts and so on so they keep telling more people thinking they’re benefitting themselves when really they’re only the companies’ source of making more money.

The artificial air factory was quite bizarre to me. I mean – the whole idea of getting rid of trees because of artificial air factories – god that’s scary. But I kind of see the metaphor with like libraries and how pretty soon no one’s really going to need them because we have all these other sources of information – I mean you can even find whole books online. And even movie theatres. One of your very few sources of watching movies was at the theatre – now you can go to blockbuster, order it from Netflix, see it on your computer, see it on your phone, and see it on your iPod. I mean nothing’s the same. We’re taking these interesting and entertaining ideas and making them super artificial and killing it by over-doing it. I’d like to one day go see a drive in movie – like how they used to do a long time ago. I’m sure they still have them I just don’t know where.

All the information they’ll ever need is sitting in their brains feed with extremely easy access. Like computers. We don’t even have to go to libraries or read through books to study – we can find online essays, go to sparknotes.com, dictionary.com, Wikipedia, etc. Everything is at the tip of our fingers. This reminds me of the movie Wall-e. In the movie, earth is no longer live-able so all humans live on this spaceship and you see them on chairs that move around so they don’t have to walk and something like feeds as a hologram right in front of them. All they ever do is sit on their chairs, eat, and talk to people on their holographic screens right in front of them – until wall-e knocks one guy off his chair. When they get knocked down – they can’t even walk let alone pick themselves up. It’s pretty sad – they just lay on the ground till some machine picks them up and puts them back on their chairs. Anyways when they get knocked down- they’re so confused. They start to notice things about their surroundings that were pretty obvious like how they have a pool and there are SO many advertisements all around them. It’s really creepy.

And then there’s artificial babies. You can just tell them what you want your kid to look like and they can make it happen. Just like now. You can have your baby artificially inseminated by some donor – that’s so weird. I thought reproducing was supposed to be this like ‘magical experience’ – what happened to back in the days – when you just reproduced with someone you fell in love with or w.e. I mean you can even have someone else carry your own baby – now who the hell came up with that! That’s really crazy. Everything that used to be so sacred back in the days (like sex) is now completely taken for granted. Our society even sells sex. That’s fucking gross. Our society is raising a whole bunch of uneducated assholes that know how easy it is to have sex with someone so they don’t even care about feelings anymore. It’s all so weird.

I didn’t understand the whole Abe Lincoln thing though. We talked a little about it in the discussion group and some people suggested that it was for the idea that even though you can have smart genes, you can still be incredibly dumb. If that is the parallel then I completely agree. I mean people before us were a lot smarter and actually did studying. Today we don’t study as much because so lazy and we let all the technology find the information for us. We don’t even know if what we’re reading is true or false. We just receive it and choose whether we like it or not.

Who are we kidding we don’t live meaningful lives and neither do the people in feed. In fact we all live lives far from meaningful – what a waste.