Let Thy Feed Be Thy Medicine
One of my most listened podcasts is Tarot for The Wild Soul by Lindsay Mack. She thoroughly posted spiritual guidance anchored in tarot during the unfolding of this pandemic. She would often say things like “We need to be kind toward ourselves since it is the first time we experience such a phenomenon as a collective.” This would always trigger some ambiguous feelings in me. My inner dialogue would become a complain on the short-term vision most people have today as I reminded myself my history lessons showing clearly that no, it wasn’t the first time humanity experienced a pandemic.
But not so long ago, it clicked. It is true that it is the first time we experience a pandemic in this new interconnected way of living; it is the first time we experience the cognition of how big and consequential a pandemic can be around the world as it is happening.
It is something to know that a neighborhood is suffering because of flooding, it is another to try to envision the whole world being flooded at once and the suffering that this may cause.
Quite often, academics do research that leads to results that look like plain common sense. But I guess we’re still somewhat happy to have evidence. In one of Globalization and Health’s issues, we can read that :
Mounting research shows that seemingly endless newsfeeds related to COVID-19 infection and death rates could considerably increase the risk of mental health problems. Unfortunately, media reports that include infodemics regarding the influence of COVID-19 on mental health may be a source of the adverse psychological effects on individuals. Owing partially to insufficient crisis communication practices, media and news organizations across the globe have played minimal roles in battling COVID-19 infodemics. […] Unfortunately, there is a shortage of research on how to improve crisis communication across media and news organization channels.
Like I said, this result comes as no surprise. And everybody who is privileged enough to be able to quarantine knows how the temptation to consume information is ever-present. An interesting graphic on the topic follows (you could find plenty of them here).
One aspect of this chart that made me smile is this purple rectangle at Gen Z’s consumption of memes. Research on memes also started to flourish and one of them on “depression memes” suggests they can be quite beneficial for mental health. As Connie Salvayon, a clinical social worker, said :
Talking more about mental health is always positive, and memes are this interesting way of having conversations about different mental health experiences.
Here I would argue that this can apply to political memes too.
Traditional media are capitalist inventions : their goal is more to make money than to properly inform us. What sells is sensationalism and sensationalism never rhymes with constructive. Of course, there is still some okay journalism in mainstream media, for say The Guardian is not 100% unreliable propaganda, and this applies for many other journals most probably (as long as we stay afar from the opinion section).
Therefore, I personally try to reduce my intake of traditional media. Especially lately in Quebec’s press, if I (virtually) open the journal, I am to discover that my beliefs are those of extremists and that I am a danger for the population : how peace-inducing.
Nowadays, most of the information I get is from social media, mostly from activists and memes accounts to be honest. I legit have learned about the death of Prince Harry through a meme this morning.
I often feel quite dazzled when I think about the fact that my feed is so different from my colleague’s feed. This can be a curse : we will have so much more difficulties to understand each other since our vision of the world is built from very different images and information. This can also be a blessing : we can all create feeds that represent what we want to see, get informed about.
Oh, of course, another curse of those personalized feeds is that it is now relatively impossible to have a neutral and objective view of what is going on, and it’s relatively important to be able to have such view to navigate the world. Nonetheless, we go one step at a time.
If you are prioritizing your mental health, than maybe what is the most important now is to curate a feed that help you with your mental health, and then you can think about trying the impossible of objectivity.
It’s not realistic to tell ourselves that we will be able to reach complete emancipation from the toxic environment of social media. That’s why I advocate for a makeover of this environment at the best of our capacities, that is, to curate it in order to receive content that feed our revolutionary souls. Practically, this might involve following (and interacting with, for the algorithms to understand) activists’s account rather than news account. This might involve unfollowing accounts that cover subjects that triggers too much anxiety for you. And so on.
In my opinion, the “leftist meme community” is one of the most amazing social media medicine for us anticapitalists. We become sometimes so easily overwhelmed by feelings of isolation AFK because of our beliefs. When I see all those commies and anarcho memes, it helps me appreciate that, even if I don’t see them, there’s plenty of people out there rooting for the disruption of status quo just like me. And by sharing those political memes, I like to tell myself that I create a space for discussion and tacit belonging as well.
So let thy feed be thy medicine and turn that echo chamber to your advantage.
With love,
Ariane (they/them)