Wake
up. Text. breakfast. Twitter. Go to school. Facebook. Lunch. Instagram. Back to
class. Snapchat. Dinner. Tumblr. Homework. Skype. Sleep. Repeat the process.
You wake up in the middle of the night to
use the washroom and check all the social network sites and retweet Rihanna
before you roll over and go back to sleep.
We all know
what it’s like to be at a restaurant or a party with friends, or at a family
gathering where everyone is chit-chatting, except not exactly with each other.
Alternatively, we’re all crouched over our mobile devices, tweeting, posting
pictures and conversing with people in another far away land and ultimately
neglecting the people around us. On one hand, it’s easy to admit that social
media has taken over and completely changed human interaction as we once knew
it to be, but on the other hand, I thank the technology gods every day that it
exists—especially now that I live on the other side of the world from friends
and family. You see, I have this thing called FOMO.
Fear Of
Missing Out----The conviction that everyone else is having a better time of
life than us. Going to better parties, getting better jobs being happier and
more socially active. Going out to lunch or dinner or may be going to a party
and taking hundreds of pictures so you could upload on instagram or facebook
and creating a sense of fomo among your friends and followers the pressure to
do this can make it difficult for us to enjoy the moment as we are all absorbed
in taking selfies rather than interacting with the people around.
“Now, if I
got to a party, I’ll probably spend most
of my time thinking about what I’m going to tweet about it, so the party sounds
really amazing. ‘Or I’ll be thinking in which angle I should take my selfie”
Fomo is
actually regarded as one of the most potent social anxieties of our age.
The
word “FOMO” secured urban dictionary mentions in 2011 and made to the Oxford
English Dictionary in august 2013.
It’s the reason
we find ourselves wondering if not knowing Hannah Montana means we are irredeemably
out of the loop .Its why we think we must start watching “Game of thrones” not
because we want to, but because everyone else is going crazy for it. In this
way we happen to develop an artificial persona, to live this externally
constructed life and hence we end up with an audience and not friends.
For example, Have you ever made an album on
facebook with a series of pictures with your hair and makeup done and trying to
show your friends that your and getting ready for a big night out and then
updating status all night long . But the thing is there is no party we are
going though all of the trouble just to show our FB friends that we are cool
and get a bundle of like on instagram.
On Facebook;
friends are sharing their newly taken holiday pictures across the social
platform and generate envies across their network. On the visual-driven social
platform, Instagram, we can see how our friends are eating exotic animals,
drinking delicious looking cocktails and even regular sunny-side up eggs, eggs
look hip & fashionable. And if we left Twitter for a few seconds, we would
miss out on how “very not-mainstream“the new music video of Justin biber is. To
bring it to the point: Everywhere where you are not, things are happening.
“We
are the generation of Social Media; our biggest Revolution is a Tweet of 141
Characters.”
A study conducted by the University of Chicago found that social media can be even more addictive than cigarettes!
Symptoms of social media addiction include
spending at least four hours a day using it, bringing mobile phones to the
bathroom, checking websites as soon as you wake up and just before you go to
bed, cancelling activities and feeling anxious when you cannot get onto the
Internet.
You may think that following fitness freaks or checking up on your ex or your
enemies are all harmless ways to pass time, but those things can lead to
self-doubt and depression.
I’d like to urge you
people of the digital world to step away from your Smartphone or computer every
once in a while. There’s this really awesome place I heard about a while ago
called “Outside”. It’s a place where you engage in tangible experiences rather
than virtual ones. I know it can sound a little intimidating at first, but I
promise you’ll love it!
Read it. Enjoy it. Share it. No one
wants to miss out on these news.
