SHARE A COKE WITH A FRIEND, share happiness! :)
Don’t you just wish you had coke now?………..Well, here we are in the book Feed, we are still in America, its around 100+ years later, yet we are still bombarded by useless, annoying pieces of advertisements. You would think that would become meg old and shit, but instead it has become a part of our and their (the Feed characters’) everyday lives.
We are like Barbie TM dolls. As a child, you control your Barbie TM. You make her do what you want; the way she is dressed is based on what you think is nice, the “imaginary meals” she intakes, is based on what you want her to eat, your version of delicious. Once upon a time, we were the ones who controlled society, but now society controls us. We are their helpless Barbie TM dolls and we fail to realize it.
They feed us the food that they find to be more economically beneficial for their own pockets, and then enforce their products in our minds because they make sure that we are constantly surrounded by their ads every minute of every day.
It is seriously unbelievable how accurate the book portrays the topic of consumerism. First off, in the book Feed, M.T. Anderson uses a clever technique, that honestly I have never seen in a book before. He interrupts the story with feedcasts, banners, or ads (as you may know them). Why does he do this? I mean it's bad enough for us at it is. For example,
we can’t watch a youtube video without a commercial coming up at the very beginning, advertising various different things, but because you are meg annoyed, you wait patiently as you countdown the seconds for the “skip ad” button to become available. Worst case scenario, is if you get stuck with those ads that last a whole 15 seconds without the chance to skip. We are forced to allow ourselves to be interrupted by advertisements all the time; when we watch a movie, when we go on youtube, when we go on basically any website, the billboard signs as we drive, ads on the radio, and now we are being interrupted in a book. Sooner or later we will have to watch a commercial before being allowed to use the bathroom. Because we are looking at the world through Titus’s eyes, we need to experience the feed in a similar way. Therefore, Anderson interrupts us with the banners to provide a glimpse of how the characters are interrupted, as well.
"It was a chance to rip off the corporations, which we all thought was a funny idea." (Anderson 158)
Here we see that Titus and his friends think they can outsmart the large corporations, but what ends up really happening? Coca-Cola is throwing a huge "give-a-way": If you talk about the great taste of Coca-Cola to your friends like a thousand times, you get a free six-pack of it; so they "decided to take them for some meg ride by all getting together and being like, Coke, Coke, Coke, Coke for about three hours so we'd get a year's supply." (Anderson 158) They think that they are playing the system, but in reality they are just being played by the system. Later we find that Link asks Marty if he actually has Coca-Cola and Marty replies by saying, "No. But, fuck, aren't you getting like meg thirsty? With all of this talking about the great taste of Coke?" (Anderson 158) In the end, they all go out and buy Coke. Are you fucking kidding me???
"And the feed spoke to me real quiet about new trends, about pants that should be shorter or longer, and bands I should know, and games with new levels and stalactites and fields of diamonds, and friends of many colors were all drinking Coke, and beer was washing through mountain passes, and the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had got lesions, so lesions were hip now, real hip, and mine looked like a million dollars. The sun was rising over foreign countries, and underwear was cheap, and there were new techniques to reconfigure pecs, abs, and nipples, and the President of the United States was certain of the future, and at Weatherbee & Crotch there was a sale banner and nice rugby shirts and there were pictures of freckled prep-school boys and girls in chinos paying on the beach and dry humping in the eel grass, and as I fell asleep, the feed murmured to me again and again: All shall be well . . . and all shall be well . . . and all manner of things shall be well!" (Anderson 148)
Ads in your brain? Honestly, I would die. How do they not fall over or run into things? Do they not get annoyed? Anyway, as I read this quote, it showed many of the products that the Feed was telling Titus to buy, but I mostly paid note to the last part, “All shall be well . . . and all shall be well . . . and all manner of things shall be well!” I know I have heard this before, so I typed it up on google and searched for it. I found that the quote the Feed murmured was actually from Julian of Norwich who was a female religious writer from the Middle Ages. When we look at context of the original quote, we find that she was explaining how although we are all great sinners, that God loves us anyway, and in the end everything will be well. So the way the Feed interprets it is actually replacing the spiritual significance with consumerism. Saying something like: God isn’t going to make everything well, but buying stuff will make everything well.
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“There's nothing but the feed telling you, This is the music you heard. This is the music you missed. This is what is new. Listen.” (Anderson 5)
“Quendy and Loga went off to the bathroom because hairstyles had changed.” (Anderson 20)
“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.” (Anderson 279)
Everything they do depends on what the feed thinks is popular. Their happiness is based on the feed. The latest trends are being based on the serious conditions going on with the world as a way to keep the population distracted. Everyone is so busy and distracted looking for the latest hairstyle or fashion trend and trying to keep up with the “cool” stuff, that they fail to realize what is, in reality, going on with the world. Take for example the lesions. They are shown to them as a trend, when in fact, there bodies are suffering because of the lack of attention to the environment. It is serious, yet the corps have made it into something that people want to get done to their bodies willingly. THAT’S MEG GROSS!
“But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them, and help you make buying decisions that are hard. Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that's keyed just to you, and then they give it to their branch companies, or other companies buy them, and they can get to know what it is we need, so all you have to do is want something and there's a chance it will be yours.” (Anderson 48)
Titus is saying that it is wonderfully amazing that the feed is able to create a kind of consumer profile that tells you what you want before you even know what you want. He says that everything they think and feel is basically recorded by the Corps. Isn’t that scary? They know everything about you. They hand out your information to other companies and you are basically a means of income and a piece of property. I thought slavery was abolished, yet the companies are chaining these teenagers, trading them like property, and basically forcing them to obey.
"We Americans, are interested only in the consumption of our products." (Anderson 290)
To conclude, I am left speechless. Our entire consumer based society just makes me sick, because it is so fucked up, yet I am a willing participant of it. I allow myself to be like Titus. I might as well have the feed in my head, because I am a victim of this as well. The media and these companies are constructing our personality and its sad that we are letting them. As M.T Anderson explains it, “Already my dreams of who I wanted to be, my understanding of who I had been in the past, my hopes for who I’d become in the future— these things had already been influences and perhaps even constructed…” Anderson got it right when he said this, without realizing it, we are allowing the media to portray for us an image of what music is cool, how to dress, what to be when you grow up, the definition of beauty, etc. Everything is being constructed for us and we need to stop it. Perhaps, we have gone so deep that we cannot resist, because sooner or later the major corporations will catch up to us, but is it worth trying? Violet suffered sadly because she tried. She was unable to move, unable to talk, unable to give a perspective or voice, and she was refused help because she wasn’t a reliable investment. Can that happen to us if we try to resist? Will our voices not be heard in society anymore? Will we not be offered help or support? What will happen? What should we do? Honestly, I don’t know, but it is definitely something we should think about.
-Leslie T.
(Prompt 4)
WORKS CITED:
Anderson, M.T. Feed. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2002. Print.
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