Pera or Pwersa

Some days, you might find yourself in the middle of a conversation you don’t understand, nodding along mindlessly to whatever remarks and comments your companions have to offer, jokes flying over your head. You might find yourself feeling regretful, an uncomfortable pit in your stomach you can’t seem to shake, but you can’t find it in yourself to ask, because god forbid you had to ask a question to something so obvious to everyone else. You don’t want to seem weird or uninformed, you just…don’t want to miss out.

FOMO, short for Fear of Missing Out, is an apprehensive emotional response to a particular phenomenon, wherein the consumer perceives that they are missing out on a crucial experience and/or information. FOMO is commonly used as a marketing tool, often using social exclusion as the main consequential crux of it as a marketing strategy. Consequently, an effective use of FOMO encourages the user to engage and participate in whatever product, event and information that is being advertised, in the interest of maintaining social relations and perceived inclusion (Gupta & Sharma, 2021). Though FOMO as a term was coined around the year 2004, the feeling this phenomena brings can be traced back to earlier consumer reports on advertiser feedback. 

Given this, FOMO, as a recently created concept, can hence be described as social behavior driven by a culture of persistent social belongingness, not to be confused with inclusivity, often driving consumption at the expense of the consumer. Said expense may be monetarily or socially measured, though in the case of streaming services, may be applicable to both.

FOMO is driven by an external pressure for social relatedness and cultural inclusion, wherein social pleasure is drawn from being “in the know”. Streaming platforms and media become one of the main modes of maintaining said social inclusion, where consumers' social behaviors are predicted by the content peddled out by both social media and streaming platforms.  As based on the extrinsic motive of avoiding risks of incompetence and lacking relatedness, the objectives and expectations of FOMO-driven behavior are mainly focused on the extrinsic reward of removing social apprehensions. As such, FOMO-driven consumption extrinsically rewards the consumer with reinforced social stability and lessened social concern, and intrinsically rewarding the consumer with enjoyment by fostering impressions of competence and relatedness (Kim, Lee, Kim, 2020)

Streaming platforms and media become one of the main modes of maintaining said social inclusion, wearing consumers' social behaviors are predicted by the content peddled out by both social media and streaming platforms. In the consumption of streaming media, a phenomena classified as the “Social TV” can be found among viewers, wherein viewers of the content often devote one screen to watching the content, while the other is focused on sharing the experience and communicating about the events of said program. Manifestations of this such as live posting threads on X, formerly Twitter, or posting stories on Instagram fall beneath “Social TV” phenomena, can be characterized further as the “Second Screen Experience” (Conline & Billings, 2016)

As these behaviors become normalized, consistent fear of social exclusion from media content often leads to a difference in behaviors of those with consistent viewership patterns than those that regulate their consumption of streaming content. As found by Van Solt (2019), while social exclusion has been seen to lead to conspicuous consumption and donating behavior it also leads to poor self- regulation, more aggressive behavior, and self-destructive tendencies.

Some would argue that the perpetuation of FOMO can be a good thing, allowing consumers to choose the content and conversation they engage in through access to media platforms, which can in turn positively affect social engagement (Freedman, William, & Beer, 2015). However, the crux of FOMO as a concept stems from the automaticity of it, in which consumers are unaware of the ways in which FOMO is embedded into streaming platforms and its algorithms, and thus lacks the agency for any form of regulation and social intention that comes thereafter. As previously stated, cultures of social inclusivity are peddled by major corporations for no other reason than profit.

As previously stated, cultures of social belongingness are peddled by major corporations for no other reason than profit. Streaming corporations do not care whether you feel isolated by the ever growing culture of constant online connectedness, they just want your money! However, you and your friends do, and may end up influencing consumers to engage in negative behaviors. FOMO is prevalent, but the prevalence of FOMO is not solely on us. These corporations peddle these social behaviors, and it is up to us to decide for certain whether that new show is truly just for our leisure, or if it's out of FOMO.