Think about your daily routine for a second.
First — is it a routine? Do you start your day the same way, day in and day out? Wake up, make coffee, shower, brush your teeth, head off to work?
We’ve come to accept these moments in our day as essential, necessary — moreover, we do them without pause. We do them in a general, logical order . . . coffee to wake up and enable us to shower with some level of alertness, teeth brushing after eating breakfast so as not to offend coworkers with the tasty huevos rancheros we made this morning.
Now consider for a moment how you approach social media each day. If you’re one of the 800 million people with a Facebook profile, and one of the 300 million with a Twitter account, chances are you check at least one of those networks before you get out of bed.
Think about that.
We used to wake up — perhaps to an annoying alarm, or to sunshine coming through our window . . . maybe even a car alarm outside — and head straight to the kitchen. As we stumbled to the kitchen, we may have had fleeting thoughts about a dream we just woke up from, or a presentation we had to give later that morning; our routine allowed us time to process our brain’s thoughts before we had to immediately consider what was going on in the rest of the world. If you’ve become enveloped by social media, those moments have been gone for a long time, and I think it’s going to have vast repercussions in our relationships, our jobs and our health.
I recently got excited about a new social networking tool, and a friend of mine laughed as I described it. He said, “do you have F.O.M.O.?” . . . I immediately hoped that my username would be available on FOMO, whatever this new web 2.0 concoction was. “No, no . . .” he said, “Fear Of Missing Out — FOMO.”
So the question is: as we chase the latest & greatest social network — what if we didn’t — what exactly would we be missing out on?