I enjoy twitter. I really really do. I enjoy the time I waste reading all the articles that are teased by snappy 140 character-long introductions. I love that it gives me something to do while I wait in a restaurant for my friends who are always late. In the evenings, it gives me yet another thing to do besides clean my house. I laugh at all the funny hashtags that bring people together (remember #tellviceverything? - awesome) and subsequently mock people who don't understand what a hashtag is. But what I've come to realize is that twitter is also a way for all the cool kids to tell you what they are doing and make you feel left out for not doing it too. It's worse than just not knowing what's going on - with twitter, if you follow a certain type of person and watch what they are doing, you can be part of the zeitgeist (i.e. cool because you know what's happening) but be left out of it at the same time (i.e. loser because you're not there). If I'm sitting at home I can basically see what all the hip and connected people in Calgary are doing and then feel bad for missing out on it. It's FOMO (fear of missing out) at it's worst because it's self-inflicted. I guess I could just get off my ass and become more involved but sitting at home complaining about it is more my style.
PS - When I went to find a link to define FOMO, I found this NY Times article: How Social Media Can Induce Feelings of "Missing Out" It does a much better job of articulating every thought I posted above, so I apologize for making you read my rant, when I could have posted the article and been done with it.
PPS - For a long time I thought that FOMO was something my friends and I coined, as we've been using it for many years. Turns out, not so much. I actually can't believe that I haven't posted about it before. It's long been a symptom in my life and plays a big role in helping me decide to do the things I do, generally to very happy results. For the most part I've always thought of it as a positive, but when it comes to twitter, I've decided it is causing me much angst.
