Feed A

1. I think that feed is on target as an allegory of modern teenage life. When I discussed with John and Omar on Friday about the parallels, it was easy to find what was similar and difficult to notice what was different when comparing our lives to Titus's. We noticed that we both get very distracted by digital entertainment. It allows us to escape from reality and we both use it to our advantage more than we should. We also noticed that we are so brain dead we are almost immobile, people feel uncomfortable walking the streets without their ipods and in Feed, everyone has their technology implanted in their brains. We both don't really know what it is like to live without technology. He found it surprising when he Violet told her that not everyone owned a feed, "only about seventy-three percent of Americans have feeds. Oh I said. Yeah. And so I felt stupid. There's so many who don't?"(112). We find it surprising when we know of people who don't own TVs or cell phones etc.

We also discussed what we thought the lesions represented. Omar thought it was more of the big picture, how we are so digital its almost unhealthy while we talk about it like its something cool. I thought maybe it was like cigarettes, they are clearly bad for you but people continue to smoke because they want to look cool, then it turns into an addiction. Then, we talked about Violet, how she was so aware of everything around her but she still cared about what people thought of her. After a party with Titus and his crew Violet chats Titus and says, "Your friends hate me. They think I'm stupid...They think everything I say is weird and stupid...Take me home."(164-165). Although she tried to resist falling under the typical modern teenage life, she still cared about what they thought of her. In our lives we are constantly trying to be accepted by other people.

2. I think there are two main perspectives to the main tragedy, the culture is collapsing. Violet's perspective as a girl who resists the feed, she sees all the misery in the world, she knows more than just what her feed tells her. "Do you know the earth is dead? Almost nothing lives here anymore, except where we plant it? No. No, no, no. We don't know any of that. We have tea parties with our teddies. We go sledding. We enjoy being young. We take what's coming to us. That's out way."(273). She tries to resist the feed by "Trying to create a customer profile that's so screwed, no one can market to it. I'm not going to let them catalog me. I'm going to become invisible."(98). Although she was aware of what was going on around her, it lead her to her death.

The second perspective is Titus's, he lives a tragedy because he doesn't notice the world around him. He tries to live his life to the fullest by doing stereotypical modern teenage activities, but he is still unhappy. He lives his life just like any other typical teen not knowing what the feed is doing to them. He is so caught up in trying to be cool but he is never really happy.

"It turned out that my upcar was not the kind of upcar my friends rode in. I don't know why. It had enough room, but for some reason people didn't think of it that way. Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I'd been running toward it for a long time."(279).

His perspective adds to the book as a tragedy because he is always "null," he never seems to be satisfied with the thiings he buys or what his feed suggests.

In regards to my life, I suppose I could sit here and say all the things wrong with my life that would mean my life is a tragedy but I think that would just prove it even more of a tragedy. So I'll say that my perspective can be similar to Titus's in how I am dependant on technology and how often times I can be unaware about the world around me. But when I learn about the world around me, I don't really do anything about it, I may make minor adjustments in my own life which in the end, doesn't really solve anything in the bigger picutre.

Imagining our lives as a movie like a modern teenageer, "My idea of life, it's what happens when they're rolling the credits"(217) I guess in the end everyone's life is a tragedy because we all will die. There may be happy moments in our lives (of course it is debatable whether we are really happy or we just think we are happy) where momentarily you will be happy but at the end of all our lives is death. As of right now my life is not a tragedy because I'm not dead or totally brain dead yet (at least I don't think I am). I think my life is more of a boring sitcom because I my life isn't dramatically sad or dramatically amazing, so somewhere in the middle.

3. I think Feed is pretty on point, while I was ready I easily related to Titus which basically proves the parallel between average teenagers today and Titus. I don't think Titus and his crew are livin "brag" lives. They may be convinced that they are happy because they are following the norms but I don't think any of them will be truly happy until they decide what makes them happy and goes by that instead of what society influences them to do.