On FOMO and social media
One of the great illnesses of our social media age is FOMO: the fear of missing out. The ideology of social media, the way that the apps are engineered to engineer us is to keep us in a constant need for information, no matter how pointless it is, no matter how ephemeral. We must be plugged in to everything at all times. Of course, many of us are old enough to remember when this wasn't the case. We might read the morning paper and watch the evening news. We might read magazines. Our exposure to the world's news was discrete and finite. Even the early cable news channels were rolling news blocks, repeating the same stories every half hour, not trying to find something to keep you tuned in for hours at a time. When a major event happened, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, then you received wall-to-wall coverage. Not everything was "Breaking News". You had a chance to get away from it all, to not pay attention, to attend t...
