feed

feed is a novel about people who have chips implanted into their brain. These chips send information to the people. This isn’t any ordinary information though. The information that is being fed to these people is about the simplest things in life. These people have lost the ability to think for themselves. These chips tell them what they should buy, what they should watch, places they should travel, and so on. So, if a person who didn’t have a chip walked into these people’s lives, then they wouldn’t understand that person. They wouldn’t understand the person because they come from a completely different world. They have to think for themselves and learn things through School™ and through life lessons.
In this novel, the two main characters Titus and Violet are boyfriend and girlfriend. Titus had a chip implanted into his brain when he was first born and violet had her implanted into her brain when she was seven. This makes Titus and Violet completely different. Titus is very submissive to the information the chip feeds him and he also very unengaged in conversations. In conversations he says things like “wow” and “oh.” On the other hand, Violet didn’t have the chip implanted into her brain until she was seven years old. This means that Violet went to actual school and learned things through life lessons. Violet is constantly questioning the world around her and using a large vocabulary when she speaks. She is the person she is because doesn’t submit to the feed and buy anything it tells her to. Most people in this world submit to what the feed tells them they should buy because they do not have the ability to think for themselves.
I did not enjoy this novel, but it really made me question the world, as we know it. Today, technology is rapidly advancing and constantly changing. If you think about it, it is possible that someday everyone in the United States could have a chip implanted into his or her brain. This is scary to think about because life as we know it would disintegrate. Why might this be alarming? People would stop thinking for themselves and their brains would eventually turn to mush. This is because they would constantly be being told what they should buy, do, and watch. Also, if you think about it, if chips were implanted into people’s brains, people could stop inventing and further advancing our technologies.
Although feed was a hard book to follow and I didn’t enjoy it, I though it was interesting the way the author wrote it. He put two types of people into this novel, ones who lost the ability to think for themselves and ones who could resist the feed. This could relate to many other things in life. It is like high school. High school is a period in some kids lives when they follow a trend and do what other kids say is cool. But, there are also those few stragglers who do not succumb to pier pressures. They are themselves even though others view them as weird or uncool because they are not doing what is cool.