Feed Blog

Of all the books I have read in my experience in high school English courses, I have found Feed to be the least helpful in expanding my vocabulary and mind. Although through class discussions I see that some students in the class are intrigued by the question that this book brings up, whether or not technology is a good thing, I do not find the subject mildly interesting at all. Also, the obvious leftist-leaning writing of M.T. Anderson bothered me. He painted a picture of corporations that were greedy and buying things such as clouds and even school itself. They then used what they owned to manipulate the minds of the people to sell more of their product and ultimately take control over so much that it turned into a Big Brother type novel. I am a strong supporter of the rights of corporations to do, within reason, what they can to make money. After all, corporations provide for people in many ways. They create products for people to use, they stimulate the economy, and they hire workers, which helps even more to stimulate the economy. It may sound radical to say, but I think Mr. Anderson’s views come from him working all his life through colleges and other schools and having no idea what a corporation actually does for the community it’s in and the state and national economy. Also, the style of writing that he used did not work with me at all. The choppy way the kids talked, although it may have been part of the way the story was supposed to be, was really distracting to me and annoyed me throughout the book. The feed notices at the end of each chapter were really tacky in my opinion. I just thought it was a stupid waste of a few pages.
And then there’s the plot, which I thought was one of the worst I have ever read. The book seemed to me like it was trying to be a romance novel, yet at the same time be a futuristic 1984 style novel. Neither of these things worked, and the novel collapsed all over itself. Anderson tried to take a concept which was barely interesting to start with, the feeds in peoples heads, and made it even worse by creating lame characters, a very uninteresting plot line, and overall a pretty bad book.