wtscils598x08

One of the first things that struck me about the world of Feed is how superficial and insular people have become. They've lost their sense of self, they're slaves to consumerism, functioning as mere digits to large corporations. People are trapped in their cocoons, scanning feeds that make up their Daily Me's while oblivious to global events. It's a scary situation, but if you look around us, we're inching closer to that reality every day!

I think all that's going on in the last few years is a preamble for things to come. As it is, the narrowing of our worldviews is being accelerated by collaborative filtering and mass customization. The long tail of ideas may provide us with abundant choices, but it also limits discovery and the ability for us to form new tastes.

Chris Anderson disagrees with this in The Long Tail, choosing to put his faith in the recommendation systems to expose us to ideas outside our interests. I remain skeptical. My Amazon recommendations are full of library-related books and stuff related to Internet culture.

It's also uncanny to think that the characters in the world of Feed were able to pick up the feeds of others and know what they're thinking. In some ways, feeds may be the answer to our problems with human memory, but at what cost? The loss to individual privacy far outweighs anything. In retrospect, I'm glad we kicked up a big fuss over Facebook broadcasting user activity on third-party sites to your friends. It's things like this that remind us of the values that we hold dearly.