This story is about the direction we are heading into.
A company. A family. A place where everyone knows everyone. Where you receive personal appraisals from your bosses round the clock. What more could you ask for in a work place?
Mae Holland, lands this dream job. The first step she takes in and its heaven. Glass everywhere, walls, ceilings. Old, cosmic libraries. This place has rooms to stay overnight, floors to dine on, yoga, musicians just singing on the grass all day. Instantly, she falls in love with this intimidatingly mammoth place where she now belongs.
Immediately, she is connected to all the social circles. Two seconds in, and she had 10,000 followers. She had invitations to parties and to groups she didn’t think could exist. Mae had to stay up to date with it all. And that life was still sinking in.
Back home, she has her parents. Her ailing father she wants to help take care of. An infuriating ex- boyfriend, who is always a phone call away from her parents’ needs and some one who doesn’t understand the need of social media.
Mae is at the top of her game now. Connected to the world in every which way. She is here to stay.
This company has provided her with all that she wanted, more than she could have asked for. She then met someone. He was intriguing. No one around campus had ever seen him, but he claims to work there. She knew getting herself in a situation like this could possibly affect her future, but it was something she couldn't help. It was something about the mystery of it all.
She was now lost in this virtual maze of the Circle and didn't seem like she wanted to be found. She was floating away from the plain life she once lived. This world had taken over her mind completely. She was now so hungry for success and so keen on everything being out there for the world to see that she was ready to do whatever it takes to achieve it.
This book will make you think. It makes you realize how paranoid people are now about social media. Yes, there are new innovations in technology around us everyday. They sound like the next best thing. Sometimes they do work well. But how far would you go? And when technology fails you, what then?
This book, as engaging as it is, is also a reflection of the impact that technology has on us and much more. Everyone is engulfed in his or her many social media accounts. The charm of knocking on someone’s door with a cup of coffee, those Sundays where we sat with old photographs and memoires that entail, is somewhere lost in the constant need for a momentarily update. The long conversations we had remembering an old song or a movie is fading away because it’s so much easier to look it up on the Internet.
This revolution is not all bad. People are catching up and moving along with it at their own pace. Change is constant. You embrace it and move on or you stop the clock and hold on to what was, for as long as you can.