I would argue that texts that draw attention to the processes whereby societies enforce conformity to socio-political norms can situate readers as subjects who attain a degree of critical distance from narratives and characters, a critical distance that enables critique. In his essay in this forum, Darin Barney points to the distinction between participation and politics, arguing that many of the claims made for the liberatory effects of participation fail to hold up under critical scrutiny. The novel both thematizes corporate power and consumerism, and also positions readers to engage with questions about human agency in a world where individuals are bombarded with information about products and services, but denied knowledge of political and ideological contexts. Through data mining, corporations monitor people’s thoughts and emotions, using such information to engineer desires for products and experiences that accord with consumers’ profiles. In the future USA that is the setting of Feed, children are supplied with “the feed” by a powerful corporation, FeedTech Corp, which acts as a conduit for advertisements and infotainment. Secondly, I consider how the novel itself positions readers to engage with Anderson as an author whose public identity has been carefully shaped through his media appearances and especially his website. I analyze the novel’s treatment of human agency in a dystopian future America, where young people are implanted with “the feed,” a computer chip which connects them with a global network of “images, audio messages, and text-based communication” that Poyntz referred to. This paper focuses on a novel whose narrative is structured by exactly the processes of production and circulation to which Poyntz refers: M. Nevertheless, the rise of social networking and the ready availability of new technologies have significantly enhanced young people’s capacity to produce and to circulate texts and products.
In preparation for the ARCYP round table “Participatory Ontologies and Youth Cultures,” Stuart Poyntz issued an outline of its conceptual framework: “Beginning in infancy, young people now grow up learning the language of consumer media culture through a constant diet of screen images, audio messages, and text-based communication that compete with schools and families as primary storytellers and teachers in youths’ lives.” As Poyntz notes, young people’s engagement with media culture is scarcely a new phenomenon.
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