Navigating the FOMOsphere
We are exposed to more. And so there's more to miss.
And there is more we imagine we're missing.
Increasingly our online experience is one of navigating the FOMOsphere. Interacting with an endless stream of possibilities.
This existential overwhelm of the modern world is that it provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing. We're only beginning to develop cultural adaptations to confronting the FOMOsphere. These adaptations take one of two forms:
Limit the FOMO-space.
Build internal FOMO resilience.
Limiting the FOMO-space is a question of limiting time exposed to the FOMOsphere or re-engineering what constitutes that FOMOsphere. Time-limiting is perhaps most straightforward. At its most extreme, it's simply renouncing social media and unplugging entirely. More practically, it is limiting the amount of time one uses social media - and indeed when.
Re-engineering the FOMOsphere is more involved. Typically it’s fine-tuning one's curation. At the extreme end it means following fewer accounts (perhaps only close friends), or it could mean cutting off entire domains that one is interested in but not actively engaged in. It could be geographic filters where you don't see concerts or events outside your own hometown. It means ruthlessly culling exposure to accounts that cause more FOMO than they bring opportunity to engage and create.
Building FOMO resilience is a parallel path. Practicing mindfulness and reinforcing messages of understanding that FOMO is a real phenomena. On its own, this habit of willpower is not enough.
The opportunity for designers then is how to productise and amplify these desires to limit FOMO.
HMW constrain the FOMOsphere for users?
Designing limitation via user controls that are front-and-centre and intuitive. Controls that learn based on user habits; that reduces the heavy lifting of policing ones own FOMOsphere.
Or introducing truncated recommendations. Recommendations that temporarily stop once a user has engaged. Once they've chosen - we don't re-open that possibility for them.
More interesting - is the possibility of injecting the FOMOsphere with JOMO-interactions.
Interactions that allow the user to actively close off paths - actively disentangle from optionality.
Make this joy-of-missing-out an active part within the experience, without putting the willpower-onus of FOMO-limiting and resilience on users themselves.