Feed thoughts

So far I'm finding Feed to be an interesting and often funny book (I'm a little over halfway through it). Although it seems like a fanciful vision of the future, at least some of it concerns processes that are already well under way.

• portability of data - more and more things are possible by using PDAs, phones and iPods, and more and more services have web-based interfaces (not hard drive-based ones) but what's more portable than being plugged directly into the network via your brain?
• customizing of one's computer experience - websites are falling over themselves to offer recommendations and browsing experiences tailored to the web surfer. The netizen can also customize his or her own experience by selecting what RSS feeds to read (say), rather than just taking a network news broadcast as it is. Titus himself is customized by his parents before his birth, perhaps the logical conclusion to the current research obsession of linking genes to specific traits and propensities.
  
• privacy issues - following on from the point above, websites can offer customized experiences by collecting data about their users, both overtly and covertly. The initial incident where Titus and his friends are literally rebooted in order to stop the hacker is perhaps the logical extreme of this process.

Some other real-life situations, such as consumer culture, the ever-extending reach of marketing and the desire of people to a) be cool and b) be able to turn to another source for support are not technological, but are fostered by the technologies around us and the ones in the book. I'd say that Feed is a good example of the "if this goes on..." school of science fiction. As someone who likes social software, but likes even more to be away from the computer with the cellphone off, I would consider this not the kind of future I would want to live in, even without the portents that Something Evil Is Afoot Behind the Scenes.

On a more frivolous note, I have to complain about an ornithological oversight in the book. The larger point of the passage I'm whining about is that birds such as hawks in cities were a symptom of the loss of their habitat elsewhere (it might actually be a symptom of hawk populations doing well enough that they can colonize previously unused habitats, but this would be a long digression calling for more research than I feel like doing right now!).

My main kvetch is with the line, "There were streets in the cities, and eagles flew over them, wobbling without moving their wings." If a large raptor-type bird flies that way, it's really a Turkey Vulture. Eagles don't wobble, in fact, their flight is about as steady as a jet airliner. These respective differences in flight style can allow a birder to make an identification from a considerable distance.

Of course, if I REALLY wanted to over-analyze this passage, I could say that it's presented as sort of an oral history (on the feed, no doubt), so maybe the "geezer" in question just wasn't good at bird identification. :)