Feed

So I just finished the young adult book "Feed" and was reading the discussion group material that comes at the end and was really surprised to see that the author (M.T. Anderson) considers the book to be about reading and literacy. I mean, I see that, what with how no one reads anymore in the future he creates; instead, people get all their information and their news and advertisements and stuff through the feed that is literally in their brain. Basically, the people of the future (and specifically the teens, who do not remember a time before the feed) quite literally embody information. But it is quite specifically information--not knowledge, not wisdom, not reading. I was surprised, though, that Anderson wrote the book to be about reading and literacy; I read it as more of a commentary on technology and its relationship to the body and to the brain in particular. Of course these are related, but it really was a surprise to see that the author wanted his text to be a commentary on reading and literacy in the digital age.

According to a Northern State University course Web site about Anderson (http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/anderson_feed.html), has said the following about his writing:
We live in a culture of corporate-sponsored narrative, which is a culture of underwritten endumbening. In an attempt to reach an ever wider audience, television, movies, magazines, and even publishers rely on three elements pernicious to complicated narrative: first the sapping of particularity (for fear that eccentricity will frighten off potential viewers, or more dangerously, encourage the splintering of mass demographics); second, the simplification of narrative (because of an assumption that the bulk of people want to hear over and over again the stories they have already heard); and third, the pursuit of anything, be it tumbling helicopters or showering cheerleaders, that might constitute “action.”

This creates a vicious cycle, however. As children are raised on simpler and simpler narratives, they become acclimated to that banality, and grow distrustful of anything that deviates from it.

I find this fascinating, both because of the connection to the broadcast I mentioned in an earlier post (Proust, the Squid, etc.), but also because of this idea about media and publishers pushing simplistic narratives, or rather, valuing those things that are anathema to complicated narratives. I get this, and I think there is a lot of truth to it, but I am also suspicious of the simplicity of this position. First of all, is there anything more simplistic than classic Hollywood narrative?--basically, that storyline is boys meets girl, boys loses girl, boy gets girl. Or boy has friend, boy loses friend, boy finds friend. Either way, the underpinning narrative of even the most elaborate film is a simple plot with a trajectory toward heterosexual coupling (marriage) or homosocial bonding (friends). At the same time, this ignores the fact that many games and on-line settings offer the potential for complexity that are not in traditional narrative structures. The games may *rely* on the familiar structures, but there is more mobility within them. So this idea that young consumers (readers) would be suspicious of narratives that are complicated strikes me as a little naive and simplistic.

I did find the book to be quite smart. I especially thought that the idea of "feed" was used incredibly well to metaphorize what is happening in information culture--we have feeds to information, we feed on information, we consume/eat information, and yet we ourselves are in so many ways feed to the system, including the monolithic corporations but also to information itself, which feeds on us and our networks to create more networks.

I know I am late to the table regarding this book, as it was so popular a couple years back, but I found it quite serendipitous to be reading this at the end of the semester, both because of the content but also because of the interview with Anderson, which talks so much about the issues of reading and literacy in an era of new media.