Feed

I began reading Feed this past week and I find it to be an easy and interesting read if I can sit down and focus.  However, if I am not really in the mood to be reading I find it so hard to concentrate because the language they use is so very different from ours!  On page 4 Titus says "When you're going places with other people, with this big group, everyone is leaning toward each other, and people are laughing and they're chatting, and things are great, and it's just like in a commercial for jeans, or something with nougat."  When people start relating real life to a commercial, things have really gone down hill.  It makes you think, is this the life that we are headed for, where we relate real life to commercials instead of creating commercials to accentuate the best parts of life?
On page 5 Titus goes on to comment on how lonely he is:  "At parties, I was starting to get real lonely, even when there were other people around me, and it's worse when you leave.  Then there's that silence when your driving home alone in the upcar and 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."    I find it almost humerous how Titus says there is nothing but... then lists so much stimulation that if I were put in the situation I probably wouldn't be able to focus on driving.  How can someone say there is nothing while admitting there is so much going on.  This must be a type of plentitude that Lasn discussed.  He has so much that when he is immersed in all of the benefits that are meant to prevent loneliness he still feels lonely.  He has become so used to the overstimulation of this future world that he feels empty without 200 things going on.
I feel a similar issue is presenting itself with the youngest generation in our society.  There are now countless videos that are being advertised that promote early literacy or future success in school.  However, one of the first videos available for babies were Baby Mozart videos.  In my Early Literacy class we discussed how the corporation selling Baby Mozart videos offered full refunds to anyone who returned their videos because the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement recommending that children under 2 should not watch any television.  The problem found was the speed at which television moves is much faster than any speeds an infant would naturally be exposed to.  Chronic exposure to this speed for infants was found to be correlated to ADD or ADHD later in life.  It's almost as if the exposure to technology from such a young age actually wires the brain differently.
Although technology has some great benefits, I feel it will take time to really be able to weigh the costs and benefits because we still don't know the effects later in life.