ABSTRACT
At the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice sponsored by the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCTBergamo, undated), Karen Ferneding attended a presentation I gave on the overlap of consumer culture and curriculum; afterwards, she recommended what was at that time a new book by M.T. Anderson entitled Feed. Since then I have been reading this work with graduate students in curriculum. The book is about that first generation of youth who have the internet surgically implanted as a chip in their bodies, so that they are linked to the “feed” at all times. Karen’s interest in the book may have been based on her interest in electronic technologies, but she quickly saw the direct connections to what I was trying to figure out about how consumer culture and curriculum interact with identity politics and object relations. Not all of us are excited by science fiction; I often introduce this book to a class by requesting an initial suspension of negativity as the reader slowly adapts to new words and situations that are hard to find. I suggest thinking like an anthropologist who is entering a new culture and enjoys coming to a living understanding of that culture. After all, I point out, much of teaching might be analogous to working as an anthropologist, since teachers need to understand the lives and meanings their students bring with them to the classroom, and to understand the classroom community the group are forming through their common work. All of this introductory discussion ends up being unnecessary for many of us, as the book is a wonderful and quick read. It’s really not hard to enter into this story. Nor is it so much a science fiction: I read the book as a report on the state of contemporary youth culture. How different is a chip implanted in the body from a cell phone or PDA in the pocket? In this respect, Feed is about “now” only amplified just a tad to help us highlight features of electronic technologies and youth experience in a consumer culture. And it doesn’t hurt that, for no apparent reason that I can see, M.T. Andersen chose to place a major character Violet Durn’s home at 1421 Applebaum Avenue.
