Book Worth Mentioning

While I've not actually read it myself, my advisor in undergrad had a great deal of good to say about Feed, a young adult novel that, like many young adult novels, gets to be extremely up front and unambiguous about its commentary because it is unfettered by the same demands for 'subtlety' that can burden literary 'adult' fiction. The main fear of the book mirrors that of 'The Cultural Logic of Computation'. The feed is a direct cranial internet link that makes each individual subject to data mining and statistical analysis but, rather than just making it so that their tastes are catered to: 'Everything we've grown up with the stories on the feed, the games, all of that it's all streamlining our personalities so we're easier to sell to.' which is to say, it's just as convenient if not more convenient to shape consumers into categories than to shape categories to match consumers or, to be more honest, that the very creation of categories structures people.