Resist the Feed

Signing in...

First of all, I wanna apologize for the rant my previous blog turned into.  That was not my intention when I started writing it.  I may touch on time more objectively sometime in the future, but until then...
Thanks to many of my friends.  Thanks to you I was able to (peacefully) clear up a lot of misunderstandings as well as a lot of things that'd been going through my head.

So I keep trying to find A Beautiful Lie by 30 Seconds to Mars... checked CD tradepost.  Nope.  Checked Borders with my 40% off coupon.  Nope.  I could prolly find it at Walmart or Target, but I'm too cheap.
I've been buying a lot of music lately.  Two days ago I (finally) bought Feeding the Wolves by 10 Years.  I love 10 Years.  They have some of the most impressive lyrical music these days, in my opinion. Can't believe I took so long grabbing this album.  Highly recommend it, though not as much as I'd recommend The Autumn Effect.  Division is fantastic also, but I'm still the largest fan of their debut album.

To the real subject.  Feed.  M.T. Anderson. This is a masterpiece of a story.  Beyond that, it really speaks out as satire of our society today.  As is typical for any good satire, Anderson puts an exaggerated (or is it not so exaggerated?) twist on our media focused society.
It's dance. It's dance, dance, dance. That's fun. Fun's fun, and fun's what you can have. There's nothing to stop you from fun.
That is the beginning of a typical advertisement that could be literally running through your head right now if you had a feed installed.
The Feed is a transmitter that is implanted in most people's brains at birth.  From that point onward, the Feed starts to create a profile for you, and then sends information, advertisement, and all other sorts of media directly to your brain.  As you engage in different activities and buy different things, that feed becomes more and more tuned to "who you are" and caters to that.  You become constantly bombarded by the media.  And it's normal.  The ability to think for yourself is slowly diminished.  You learn to let the feed tell you what is what.
I stood there wondering what it was that made her so beautiful.  She was looking at us like we were shit.  Her spine.  Maybe it was her spine.  Maybe it wasn't her face.  Her spine was, I didn't know the word.  Her spine was like . . . ?  The feed suggested "supple."
The story revolves around a normal kid raised in an American society where about 3/4 of the population had feeds implanted.  Furthermore, he lived in a normal suburban town where everyone had a feed.  It was easy to forget that some people didn't have them.  Anderson takes the reader into this world through the eyes of this teenage boy, Titus, who ends up meeting a girl named Violet, who still cares about what's happening to the world and challenges the feed.  Before Titus knows it, he finds himself spending more and more time with this abnormal girl.  Titus starts to really think for himself when Violet enters his life.  He starts to see how to be himself instead of what the Feed wanted him to be - a mindless consumer.
It was like she took my hand, or I took her hand, and we ducked through doorways, and together we went to an odd place, and it was a new place.  We went there holding hands.
The reader quickly gets just as caught up in Violet as Titus does, but from the very beginning, things are obviously going wrong.  And that fear of what the feed is doing slowly grows as the story goes by page by page.  Likewise, as the thrill of being with Violet and see the world in this whole new way starts to wain, Titus starts to become fearful of leaving what he has grown up believing.  He fears rejecting the feed.
The story extends beyond just the problems presented by a society that supports constant exposure to the media.  To consumerism.  It extends into a heart-wrenching story that left me throwing the book at the wall in the end.  It shows the kind of selfishness that comes out of a society like this.  It shows us how the "feed" can tear people apart.  How it can destroy everything that truly makes us human.
And it shows us how to resist it.
I couldn't recommend this enough, and I feel like I can't explain how wonderful a read it is without ruining it.
In my opinion, this is a must read for absolutely anyone and everyone.  And it's a relatively fast read anyway.  So please, go to the library, go to Borders, grab it off Amazon.  Borrow it from a friend.  Whatever.  READ IT.
Thanks. =)

Note:  You'll notice the collage of pictures and links I added to this post.  Their primary purpose is to give you a little idea of what I'm talking about.  The links go to Amazon, which generally has some kind of review and description of the product.  Use 'em if you like.  That's up to you.  Furthermore, if you end up buying a product I linked you to, I get a small referral.  Don't make that buy something you weren't already going to, though.  =)  Thanks for reading.

...signing out.