I’ve recently learned a new word – FOMO. It means the “fear of missing out.” It is a word born to describe this “check your Facebook/Instagram/Twitter feeds again, right now, and again, right now, and again” world. It is a brave new world, born seemingly yesterday with the arrival of the first iPhone, now copied by many. A computer in a hand held format, we now have our “feeds’ readily available. And, since they are perpetually updated, we have to check them now – and again, in the next now – and again… Because, we suffer from FOMO — we’re afraid of missing out.
Douglas Rushkoff was written a provocative book about this ever-present tyranny of the next “now” – Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Here’s part of what he says:
… we tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored. Our ability to create a plan—much less follow through on it—is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, we end up reacting to the ever-present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands.
So, instead of “Future Shock,” it is now a “Present Shock” world. And it is a shock to our system.
I will present my synopsis of this book at tomorrow’s First Friday Book Synopsis (September 6 – click here to register), and I will post a blog post soon with more of the content of this book, and my takeaways.
But, in the meantime, you and I have to check our Twitter feeds, don’t we?
First Friday Book Synopsis 