Learning What to Eat and What to Believe - Take 1

Sorting through the messages to find truth (or as much truth as is possible for me).

I feel like l learn this lesson over and over again in different ways.  If I think back to my childhood and food advertisements that I whole-heartedly believed, I remember . . . “Milk, it does the body good.”  . . . the picture of the happy mother pouring large glasses of orange juice for her children with/ or before breakfast . . . the hanker for a hunk of cheese yellow-hat man. 

Maybe I was overly trusting, overly suggestible, or just like the rest of the tail end of the Gen X-ers, but by the time I was in high school, these ideas were so ingrained in my subconscious that I barely realized that there was a chance they might not be as true as I thought.  Never mind that my dad had told me he had struggled with lactose intolerance when he was younger.  Never mind that orange juice (or really any juice) alone spikes your blood sugar.  Never mind that the hormones and antibiotics given to cows show up in what we eat and stay in our bodies. 

I think learning about orange juice really got to me.  Those Tropicana ads were so wholesome.  At least I had heard of people struggling with milk products.  It just had not occurred to me that drinking a glass of orange juice as a snack was not the same as eating an orange.  These days, I barely drink any juice, but I do eat a decent amount of fruit.

The other day I realized that it had happened again. I found out that another ‘message’ that I thought was undeniable, was incorrect. I watched a video where Dana Boyd  talked on The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online. She had a lot of interesting points.  But the piece that I really came away with was that a certain “truth” that I had believed, was shattered.  It had to do with Facebook and MySpace and I am still trying to figure out what to do about it.

A super short history on my relationship with the social web:   I have been nervous to do anything other than “look around a little” out of fear that somehow any information that I put on the web will later be used against me.  There are all sorts of ladders and curves that describe people and/or consumers’ behavior on the social web.  Until recently, I have been at or off of the tail end of most of them.  I wait to see what is “safe” and then maybe I do that. 

So, a couple years ago I joined Facebook.  I joined because my understanding was that it was ‘safer’ than MySpace, my friends were all doing it, and because I heard that MySpace was a ‘thing from the past.’  However, according to Danah Boyd, MySpace and Facebook actually had the same number of users at that time and it was more about media portrayal and shifting demographics. White, middle class, college educated people like me are prevalent on Facebook.  All the demographics that are less represented in media are the main users of MySpace.  (That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it’s pretty accurate.)

Now I have that same feeling that I had when I realized that the glass of orange juice is not the best snack for me. Duped.  Frustrated. Embarrassed that decisions that I thought aligned with my beliefs and values were actually upholding something that  “someone else” wants me to believe and be part of.

So now what? Do I start a MySpace page? Do I post a link to Danah’s talk on Facebook?  Do I chalk this up to ‘one more reason that curiosity is always important?’ Do I let this be a reminder to myself that I want to make decisions based on my values and what I do want, instead of letting fear, in this case of exposure, drive my life?  What can I do that promotes the type of physical and cultural health that I believe in?