Homework #12 - FEED A

M.T. Anderson was able to make many comparisons between how the digital influence had effected out generation. He is written an allegory, some of the similarities he makes in the book are not as obvious as others.

When i first started reading the book i was a little lost about what was really going on, i am not a very strong reader in fact it is one of my weaknesses so it helped to have many class discussions about it. One connection i made quite fast was how his friend had a overbearing attitude that reminded me of some of the people i go to school with. It is natural for all of us to find a group and we tend to stick together, at this age we all want to fit in and do what we think will qualify us to be accepted. we go to parties, experiment with drinking and drugs, most of us want to be dressed in the latest fashions and will drop ridiculous amounts of money to do so. We are"tend" followers... just to "fit in". From Titus especially i got the sense that his look on the ordinary life was that it was uneventful and pretty much all the same, he was looking for new things to do with his time. In our generation teenagers think the same thing, we are active creatures and having a limited amount of things to do gets boring, but i think for us it is more doing something that breaks the rules that excites us rather than finding a new museum or movie to go to.

Someone is always gonna copy someone else. No matter how different you are trying to be, your fitting someone else's stereotype, we are all followers. That idea was represented a few times in feed, one that came to mind was when Quendy wanted to fit in so badly that she got lesions all over her body because they were cool. Essentially they were open sores eatting away at her flesh. I can make two connections to that, our version of lesions are marking our bodies with tattoos that are almost impossible to remove or getting obscene body percings in places that our bodies should not have holes in. But i also think there is a deeper meaning that Anderson was trying to express that is not as obvious as other connections made, we are living in a world that is becoming less and less natural everyday. A lot of what we used to do by hand can be done with machines and technology. The natural way of life in a sense is being sucked out of us, we are losing the ability to be able to distinguish between our imagination and reality, similar to the lesions on their bodies eating away at there sucking the life out of them.

There are also a few ideas in the book that are not necessary possible yet in our generation but have been in the talks. The feed was able to design people personalities, programming them to like and dislike certain things. I have seem movies and watched shows on TV about how couples will eventually be able to monitor the gender of their baby and ultimately design the genes of their children. Not only does this relate to our digital unit but also to the unit which we covered last year about the American way of birth, on top of how unnatural most American births are (using unnecessary medicines that can negatively effect the babies) eventually we will be able to in a way "build-a-baby".

We no longer have to depend on out memory for much anymore, most everything is done on a computer or over the internet. we even have website to record our thoughts now (blogger.com) this is all information that we will have access to in the future.