Rather than focusing on the political aspects of a dystopia, Anderson focuses on the cultural aspects. Almost everyone has an implanted "feed" from a very young age which gives them access to unlimited information, but also seems to allow corporations unlimited access to the individual. Everyone is constantly bombarded with offers and news of sales from corporations. This has the somewhat predictable result of dumbing down the population, to the point where all they care about are stupid shows on the feed, and shopping. But wait, that sounds kind of familiar.

There are other repercussions of the feed. People seem to be developing lesions, which continue unexplained throughout the book. By the end of the book, they have become fashion statements, with people who don't have them getting them surgically implanted. But where they come from, and why, is never explained.

Also never explained is the meaning behind the attack that is described at the beginning of the book, causing several characters' feeds to malfunction. Why was the attack carried out? Did it represent some larger faction of society that was disenchanted with the feeds?

Typically, I think, dystopic novels focus on the dissenters or malcontents. Having read this book, which touches on those who rebel only slightly, I can see why that trend developed. Quite frankly, reading about people who buy into the system is just not as interesting. Still, this was a good read, with an interesting premise.

It's been a long time since I read a book aimed at "young adults" since I'm no longer in the age category, nor do I know anyone who is. I think it's always important to keep in mind the intended audience for a book, so I went into this expecting something that was going to try to reach "teens these days," and I think this book, a sort of Philip K. Dick/Anthony Burgess combo, definitely succeeds in doing that, and in a way that wasn't overly preachy or condescending.

Feed takes place in a future America where everyone can have a chip implanted when they are very young that basically streams internet and television inside your head constantly. You can communicate by a sort of combo telepathy/text messaging from one person's feed to another, or instantly look up some fact or watch a TV show. Commercials also play in your head constantly, and in a satire on direct marketing and cookie trackers, the companies that tap into your feed develop a sort of "profile" of your likes and dislikes, and thus the commercials and/or suggestions you get on what to buy are pre-geared toward something you'd likely want. You can, conveniently, also purchase items via the feed using credit.

The story follows Titus, a teen from a relatively wealthy family. He's on spring break with his friends on the Moon, which they "thought would be fun but turned out to suck," when he meets Violet, a strange, pretty girl on the Moon by herself. Titus and his friends convince her to come along to some sort of club--despite the fact that she's a little odd and uses words longer than three syllables--where the group is attacked by a hacker who infects their feeds with a virus.

The rest of the story mainly follows Titus and Violet as they build a relationship. Violet, coming from a somewhat nonconformist family, got her feed much later in life, and, thus, isn't as influenced by the illiterate consumerism as Titus and his friends (and, it seems, most of America) are. She tries to make Titus see what is actually happening in the world around him--politically, socially and environmentally--but Titus would rather tune out and watch something on his feed. If he gets really bothered, maybe he'll buy a new shirt to feel better. The lesson here for young readers is one of warning--if our current trend of text shorthand, instantaneous gratification and absolutely irresponsible consumerism and use of credit continues exponentially, we could develop into a culture similar to the one portrayed in this book. Throughout the book, the America the characters live in seems to be in constant threat of war or just complete environmental meltdown, and yet--no one (other than the few "radical" dissidents) cares. Can we become a culture that gets so obsessed with buying our way to happiness that we completely lose track of reality? Can we get so dependent on modern forms of communication that we forget how to read or speak eloquently? It's doubtful the world would ever devolve so dramatically, but it's not a warning to just quickly forget while you move on to read the newest celeb blog...

It's easy enough to compare every dystopia book to 1984 or "Brave New World". Yet here's a dystopia book directed towards a completely different audience, we, the internet generation - teenagers. Aside from the completely different sort of world, "Feed" touches on a number of entirely different themes from the most famous dystopia novels.

Yet "Feed" does the same ultimate thing "Brave New World" did for me - it made my brain hurt, provided me with some food for thought, and made me a bit nauseous. It takes me to a whole new world full of familiarities yet starkly... worse. For instance, the internet, instead of being a fundamental part of my life, IS my life and is literally jacked into my brain. Fun, right?

Well, summer vacation has taught me that the internet gets boring after a while, as do numerous other services the "feed" provides. Main character Titus tells his story loosely and somewhat confusingly (there's a lot of "modern", made-up slang - there were some words that I still didn't understand until the end of the book), but the world is clear (radiation poisoning is mentioned casually at some point, indicating towards a wider world beyond the small, teen confines of the story).

"Feed" is something of a boy's book, but it's a welcome dystopia, especially in that it's clearly its own story. It's not an easy read and catching onto the made-up slang is a bit difficult, but rather interesting. Some will see themselves reflected in these characters and even in this weird kind of world. The ending is confusing and will make you scratch your head, flipping a few pages back to understand. And while there are messages etched deep into the book, it's also simply enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Highly recommended.

In this text directed at young adults, I found myself bereft of compassion and hard to relate to the cold almost robotic emotions and actions of the cast. However, about half way into my forced endeavor (you see, this was a classroom assigned text) I found myself unable to stop reading.

It's the 1984 of a new generation. This book should be on reading lists worldwide, and more specifically on the classroom reading lists of its intended audience. The spoiled, self-centered children we are producing today could greatly benefit from reading about a world which shows the cold, artificial consequences of a consumer-driven society without human remorse. Without love. Without compassion.

This book is subtle and can use the guiding hand of an educated instructor but I truly believe it will survive as one of the great dystopian works of our time. And as much as Free Speech advocates quote Orwell today, I can only hope that my grandchildren will be quoting from Anderson when corporations are deciding the healthcare reforms of a nation so obsessed with capital gains. Then again, I can only hope that day never arrives.

Everything must go.

When i was looking through my freshman reading list to see what the first book of high school i was going to be reading was, FEED popped out to me, so i picked it. I started reading it and just got SUCKED IN! It was an amazing book and i would recommend it to ANYONE!

An insightful look at the evolution of technology and consequently the devolution of man. Fabulous book!

If, like, you can get over the, like, Valley Girl-type talk (especially, like, the use of "like"), you'll probably LIKE the spot-on satire served up by M.T. Anderson in FEED. Set in the future, this YA novel skewers America's consumerist society, corporate conglomerates, and hegemonistic government. It's easy pickings as Anderson features protagonist Titus and his friends who all have "feeds" implanted in their brains. The "feed" is a chip-like piece of software that serves like an internal computer capable of IMing friends, looking up information (Internet-like), channeling in customized advertising (once the corporation's software has read the feed wearer's demographics, that is), viewing the latest hip shows, and hearing beams from the government "news" (slanted like FOX ears, of course).

Readers will marvel at the hijinks as Titus and friends Marty, Calista, Link, and Quendy bounce around the moon, Venus, and other exotic locales getting bored by everything no matter how exciting it should be to them. Only Titus' world (OK... moon) is rocked when he meets the mysterious Violet Durn, a girl who is somehow "different" and thus alluring in a siren-like way.

Soon we learn that Vi was a late comer to the FEED and that her feed is therefore susceptible to hackers and malfunctioning. She doesn't help her cause by being a rebel with one (a cause, I mean). When she messes with the advertising feeds at the mall, the computers of Feed Tech, the corporation controlling everyone's feeds (let's be honest -- brains), takes notice. It will come back to haunt her when her feed begins to malfunction in a big way. There's a human side to Violet, we discover, and she's prone to saying the wrong things in front of Titus' way-cool friends who like to do stuff like get mal ("malfunction," or get drunk or high in some way, as we might call it).

Ambitious by Young Adult genre standards, FEED hits its mark, even if the target, as represented by the US government, Microsoft, corporate advertisers targeting teens and other big spenders, etc., is big fat and hard to miss. Perhaps a bit long, perhaps a bit heavy on the profanity, and perhaps, like, hampered by its self-centered protagonists' dialogue, the book nonetheless is a worthy read and has some real depth and soul.
I recommend it to older teens and adults alike, especially if they are fans of 1984, BRAVE NEW WORLD, THE GIVER, and other works of that futuristic ilk.

In this cautionary book, YA (Young Adult) author Anderson takes a familiar element of cyberpunk fiction and applies it to American teenage culture in the far future. In this vision of "wetware", brains can be directly wired to the internet, creating a streaming"feed" of audio, video, and text that operates as a kind of second level of consciousness. People can mentally IM each other across the room, and as their brains process what they see, they are bombarded with targeted advertising. We are introduced to this future via narrator Titus and his cohort of friends. They are archetypes of vapid teens, blindly following the latest fashion trends (and in this ultra-wired world, girls change hairstyles by the hour), purchasing the latest clothing off the feed, getting wasted at semi-legal "malware" brain-scrambler sites, and generally ignoring anything beyond their immediate superficial concerns.

When the group goes to the moon (kind of a mix of Las Vegas and Daytona Beach) for spring break, they encounter the dark side of the feed -- the possibility of getting hacked (since the feed is wired directly to their brain, this can have calamitous effects). Titus also meets and befriends Violet, a home-schooled girl who takes a shine to him and wants to join his circle of friends. It's not really clear why a girl as smart and allegedly beautiful as Violet would be interested in the nice, but not particularly bright or introspective Titus, but their relationship becomes the basis for Anderson's rather obvious anti-consumerist message. Violet is the bright alternachick who'd figured out that the feed's main purpose is to get people to buy stuff, while Titus is the nice, but not too deep dude who just wants to get along and have a good time. His inability to accept her inconvenient truth plays out plausibly, as Anderson wisely avoids any cheesy moments of realization or transformation. But this is undercut but all the characters' two-dimensionality and the story's overall lack of nuance.

There's a running background story about unrest around the world resulting from America's massive consumption, and some unexplained lesions that are appearing on everyone's skin, but Violet is the only one paying attention as the group does the standard teenage stuff. The book does a very convincing job of sketching the lives of future teens, with particular attention to language (for example, instead of saying "Dude!", people say "Unit!"). Chapters end with blasts of the feed, giving a keen sense of the barrage of marketing directed at the characters. Unfortunately, the teens who are most likely to read a dystopian semi-cyberpunky novel about the dangers of capitalism and consumerism are the ones least likely to need to hear the message.

Yes, this book is not sci-fi. It does not deal with groundbreaking themes, and the characters do not noticeably improve. But then, some lessons bear repeating and life is not one great journey of epiphanies and transformation.

This book follows the lives of Titus and his friends in a futuristic dystopic future that has been taken over by consumerism. People have computer chips in their heads, which urge them on in purchasing and pleasure seeking. On the moon, Titus meets Violet, who is a noncomforist.

The innovative details: like how meat is acquired, the fall of the forests, etc, make this novel innovative and unforgettable. Wound throughout the whole book is a bitterly biting humor. The language is a bit coarse; but it is well done.

I highly recommend this book.

It was a boring weekend, so they decided to go to the moon for what was supposed to be a fun weekend. But it turned out to being a boring week. There wasn't much to do so they got really bored. Then he saw a pretty girl that he started to like, but he wouldn't go up to her and talk to her because he was sacred that she would turn him down so he followed her around for a while. They got in to this restaurant and he watched her then all of a sudden his friends came in and they were acting like they were crazy. They had to leave the restaurant because they were being too loud. He ran in to this girl again and now he started to talk to her. He found out that her name was violet and that they have a lot of stuff in common. They then went to the mal.
Then a couple of days later Titus went up to and took her to a party. During the party this guy sent a virus through there chips and the police told them that they had to shut them down so that they wouldn't get hurt. Later on that we found out that she had to have her chip removed. Cause it got hurt during that accident. She had to get hers removed, and now Titus wanted his removed but he can't. I would recommend this book to people who like weird type of stuff. This was a really good book. I didn't like how violets were the only one whose chip got damaged and it couldn't be fixed.

This book is a scary warning about our future, one that might not be so far way. At the same time, it's kind of funny. The language was strange, almost like people forgot how to speak, thanks to all the images and messages they get directly from a computer wired into their brains. The main thing they are told to do is keep buying, since corporations send the messages. The idea is that people are told what to think and do, rather than think for themselves. And oh, the government is listening to everyone too, which is the scariest part. Another book I really liked about the future is An Audience for Einstein. Both books are on my favorites list.

In the you have a computer chip in you brain called a feed that you can use for the internet and a lot of other cool stuff but the government can hear what you are thinking. The teens in this book have them. There names are Titus, Link and Marty. One day they take a trip to the moon for a vacation. Up there Titus meets a girl named Violet that is from the same place they are from, so they hang out until a computer hacker hacked into there feeds made them pass out. They all recover okay except for Violet she has a problem her feed is messing up her body. Will she make it? Read the book to find out.

I like this book because it takes place in the future and the part about the feeds. There is no book in comparison. For all you people how love books about the future this book is for you.

Feed is a very captivating book. The people of the future have their own slang, where sometimes it took you halfway into the book to finally figure out what the word meant. I thought that the last page, written as a Feed Advertisement, "Everything Must Go" was kind of a reprimend of things that might come. I still cannot understand what this truly means, as there are so many hidden meanings to this phrase. Overall, its a pretty tragic book with people slowly dying and Titus's world falling apart. Reading that, I sometimes wonder if M.T. Anderson is right, that the media is shaping our society in frightening ways.

-Stephanie