Reading Activity 0201: What my "liked' groups on Facebook have to say about me

 What my 'liked' groups on Facebook have to say about me

Activity 0201

Scrolling through my liked groups on Facebook showed me from present to past where my interests lay over time, as well as
people I was associated with/friends with at the time, and beliefs I had/causes I was passionate about. Honestly as soon as I went down about 30 groups I began to see things I no longer even care about or remember specifically (I can recall the phase of my life, my feelings and attitudes towards peers, culture and society that I held, even the friends and social circles that I was with at that time). For example, currently everything is astrology or tarot, particularly tarot groups. As I scrolled further down I saw more and more environmental activism groups and social justice groups. It's not like I don't care anymore about social justice or the environment, but at that time I still believed that perhaps something could be done to save the environment and prevent it's collapse, however based on scientific findings and studies I have read more recently, we're way past the tipping point and the oceans are already in the process of collapsing, we've lost half of the species on earth to extinction, and before my very eyes the seagulls and other seabirds are basically gone, the starfish are gone, the sunfish and the little red velvety starfish are gone, I see no more minks and mink babies on the shore, the garden has less earthworms and insect life etc.

 I think I wouldn't classify my attitude as despair but rather as a grim realism, and a dislike of magical thinking. The news and even large swaths of the scientific community try to downplay the actual real time collapse of the intricate network called ecosystems and the frightenting speed inwhich we are witnessing our own inevitable extinction which I believe based on my reading and studies will be sooner than we can imagine. Probably 20 years. Clearly,  I lost my belief that there was time or I could even affect change. On these issues, the powers that be who created the environmental problems (about 100 companies who knew the results of their polluting activities since the 60s and 70s but didn't care) have too much power and all the wealth combined with the strange disconnect between people during this time of so called 'social' media, caused by it I would say, at least in part, has made strong and consistant movements useless. Even though I must say they spread movements to large groups and created short term uprisings, they did not last, and part of this is because there was a lack of direct human to human organizing in some cases, the armchair warrior class stopped caring when the powers that be intervented and squashed them. The people on the ground were no match. No matter how people tried (I was very motivated and politicized for example and in many groups to do with Occupy Wall Street, the pipeline protests in northern BC, even the revolution in Egypt all of which were credited with social media's influence, definitely true) I eventually must have become disillusioned by our ability to affect change. 

Particularly in an identity politics age as opposed to a social movement that values the inherent common good and not individual good of class analysis and understands Marxism and the history of social movements without the internet being involved. You used to have to show up and stay. Egypt was an example of people showing up certainly, but then the Muslim Brotherhood won the election anway sort of defeating the purpose. In the other groups I was involved with or following like Occupy and local issues like salmon farming, and pipelines and conservative government policies that hurt people and nature, there was a real lack of boots on the ground, so that when the powerful came to destroy the movements they were able to. I learned that the only revolutions that have ever worked are the ones where the demonstrators stayed and fought for the hearts of the police, the protectors of the elite class, and once they realized their interests were aligned with the protestors and abandoned the power elite, they immediately fell. That is why non violent revolution is the only way to succeed. 

One way the media (owned by those with the money and interest in squashing social justice/environmental movements) has been able to stop any change as well is to portray the protestors as violent, even doing violent acts to frame peaceful protesters as violent chaotic anarchists, which changes the hearts and minds of regular people including the police who might have joined in the past if their was some fair news coverage, or people organizing together in kitchens or town halls etc. against the movements, sowing doubt and cynicism. In that way social media created, and then it destroyed as well. I think I slowly realized this and just drifted away from these groups. I wasn't directly involved in any of this stuff, but I did get highly involved in my own social justice work which was volunteer advocacy for people trying to access supports and services in our own province and communities. None the less, I have apparently moved on to astrology. In this current pandemic, online tarot and astrology readers are seeing unprecidented numbers of clients, and my own studies have kicked me into gear, I only read these because a. they are my main interest but also b. they are the only groups that show up on my wall anymore and i have never bothered scrolling back to see what other groups I once perused. Interestingly my algorythms have steered me away from the collective good, to the personal good. Hmmm..it's hard not to be paranoid.

Another thing I see is babyshowers, weddings, all sorts of events that have long passed. I see people in these types of groups/pages who I don't even like anymore, or had fallings out with or drifted from. There would be literally HOURS if not days of excrutiatingly going through all of them and gettting myself OUT. It gives me a bummer feeling to look at some of it actually. 

The one thing that feels relevent and that I found interesting was I was able to trace the major events in my life in the last four rather difficult years that caused me to join support groups. So for example, further down I see that I joined a lot of groups for parents with children who had cleft lips and palattes when I discovered my son would have one at 20 weeks in the womb. It reminds me of that horrible period that is thankfully now over. Then, slightly further up I see the autism groups that I was in when my son was diagnosed with autism, and on a lighter note all the Keto groups I was in when I lost the baby weight.(Excuse the pun). Those experiences were/are all quite difficult, I would no longer want to visit any of them. I have an autism team, and the general attitude in a lot of the autism groups for example is people/moms venting about how hard it is etc, when that is not my experience. It's not autism that makes parenting hard. It's parenting. However I am glad I took a look because it reminds me of where my head was at even more recently and relates directly to my life now with my child. 

I wonder if my dissipation of interest or engagement in all the social and environmental justice groups may not have just been an increasing awareness of the hopelessness of the situaton was in part because without noticing I spent more time on astrology and tarot and then began to see more of it and the more I interacted with astrology etc the more I saw until it has now become the only topic on my newsfeed, for real.  It is interesting to see the way that the groups I joined were definitely influenced by the algorythms.