When I began reading "Feed" by M.T. Anderson, I was intrigued by the concept of a vast, Internet-like network hardwired into the mind and the promise of a thought-provoking dystopia some critics connected to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."

Written from the perspective of a teenage boy, much of the text, including dialogue, narration and internal musings are in a slang-filled, futuristic, teenage vernacular. The narrator, Titus, calls his friends "unit" instead of dude and something cool is "brag" or "meg brag." After a few chapters, the unusual terminology stops looking so out of place and the slang-riddled dialogue between the teenagers becomes typical and reminiscent of the casual, banal chitchat overheard in the hallways of any high school.

Teenage conversation aside, the premise of the novel presents an interesting concept. In Titus' world, when the children are quite young, they receive a feed, a system so totally integrated with their bodies as to provide constant connection to what, for us today, would be something like the Internet.

The feed, though, presents Titus and his peers with far more than the capabilities of today's Internet; it constantly remains active inside the brain, bombarding the mind with advertisements, political messages and television shows, automatically tailored to the individual's specific interests.

People chat with one another, seemingly telepathically, because everyone is wired into the feed, allowing anyone to chat anyone else without actually saying anything out loud. Essentially, the feed combines the ease of access and personal marketing of a consumer culture with the interconnectedness and capabilities of the Internet.

This all seems fantastic, but the feed makes everything too simple, too instantaneous, too synthetic, and instead of connecting people and giving them access to the endless knowledge of a hyper-personalized network, the feed separates people. It isolates them and dumbs them down.

For instance, Titus' father, a banker, speaks in the same vernacular as his teenage son and even the president's speeches, which are broadcast on the feed, are only barely coherent and reminiscent of a middle school student trying to present a book report.

But then comes Violet. As a result of a particular set of circumstances, Violet received her feed at a later age, doubtlessly contributing to her inquisitive and intelligent personality, which Titus' friends deem snobby and abnormal. The world intrigues Violet. She wants to experience more than parties on the moon or advertisement-filled shopping malls and, most importantly, she doesn't want to be pinned down and defined by her feed. She wants to resist, and she resists by confusing her feed, shopping for ridiculous items in order to make it impossible to market to her.

Titus, Violet and the others characters, along with their feeds, help to create a satire that is simultaneously light-hearted, thought-provoking and, ultimately, quite grim.

At first, the concept of a feed seems relatively harmless. It would be fun to be able to watch a movie by accessing it in your mind or chat up a couple of your friends in a particularly uninteresting lecture, right? Yeah, maybe technology does get a little excessive sometimes, but what's the harm in it? It's not like we're that dependent. We can laugh at the characters in the book who are totally immersed in their cyber-worlds, disconnected from each other and their own minds, but they're not like us, are they?

And that, simply, is what I think makes this novel brilliant. Anderson mocks the reader with his startlingly accurate parodies of a society consumed by the comfortable convenience of technology. He gets the readers to scorn the characters for being so terribly dependent on their feeds and hover cars and smirk at their lack of intelligence, but what he is really doing is scorning the readers and giving society a pretty solid slap in the face.

To me, Anderson isn't simply preaching about what could happen if we don't allow technology to lessen the grip it has on nearly every aspect of our lives and kick our consumer culture to the curb. Throughout the course of "Feed," Anderson shows us, through extremely relatable satire, that technology does indeed have a grip on modern society, a death grip, and one that we must figure out how to moderate before we become literally inseparable.

Because the vernacular makes it a little challenging to engage in the book at the beginning, at least for me, and because there are certain series of events that are more or less easy to predict, I give "Feed" four out of five stars.

Kaylea Pallister is a K-State alumna. Please send comments to edge@kstatecollegian.com.