Feed

The novel Feed is a brilliant caricature of today's technologically driven society. It envisages a future world in which babies would have computers and TVs connected to their brain. Like all caricatures, it has more than a grain of truth to make the point.

A la Huxley (Brave New World), Anderson points out that technological progress is not an unadultrated bliss. On the one hand, technology builds on iteself; there is very little lateral technological development. In other words, most of the development takes place on the top of whatever has been developed earlier. Thus, technology represents the march of human progress.
On the other hand, not all the people react in a similar manner to the same innovations. For example, let us consider the internet,possibly the greatest innovation in human communication since telephone. It would take us only a few moments to notice that hundreds of innovative ways of abusing this medium have been deviced in a relatively short span of time.
Technology is neither good, nor bad. It is what people do with it. Unrestricted use of technology is likely to result in a kind of world where intellectual activity is traded for idle pursuits, just the kind of future that is described in Feed. However, it would be unwise to shun technology merely for its potential to be abused. If used wisely, technology our greatest tool.
In conclusion, Feed is a cautionary tale. It shows the possible pitfalls of becoming an unconditional technophile.