The Fear of Missing Out
"Socialize" By Nancy Jean Lopez
The advent of SNSs was ushered into the online space under the guise of enhancing and supplementing social interactions; they were never meant to replace real-life social interactions. Nevertheless, SNSs have become more popular and plentiful in the last decade because of persuasive design features that fuel IA. Psychologists termed the specific phenomena associated with SNS addiction the Fear of Missing Out or FoMO. Alutaybi and his colleagues from Bournemouth University cite a fellow researcher in the field when he defines FoMO as the "pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent and is characterised by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing" ("How Can Social Networks…" 3758). FoMO manifests not with the usage of SNSs but offline when the user is engaged with the real world. FoMO is a craving for the simulated social interactions found on SNSs like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.