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With the emergence of new ways of life and media, more and more niches became visible.
A few years ago, when Twitter was still Twitter, someone complained to me that he had missed everything there for years, “all the important shitstorms!” Not to mention that most shitstorms are as worth missing as articles about royal scandals: you always miss almost 100 percent of everything. Even if you were there.
I spent a lot of time on Twitter for fourteen years, but I saw so little of it that “tip of the iceberg” would be an exaggeration. And while I was busy missing 99.98 percent of Twitter, 99.99 to 100 percent of what was happening on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, and Twitch passed me by.
In 2023, the non-fiction book “Extremely Online” by journalist Taylor Lorenz was published, a social history of social media from the turn of the millennium to TikTok. It was actually impossible to spend more time on the Internet than I have in these decades, and I have nothing to reproach myself for. Nevertheless, almost everything that Lorenz describes in her book is new and unknown to me. This is partly because the author lives in the USA and I live in Germany, and partly because I have become more and more interested in text and the book is more about visual developments.
But above all, the Internet is an unwieldy, big thing. There won’t be many people, even in the US, who will read the book and think, “That’s exactly how it was! I was there!” Instead, most people will probably think, “Ah, so I could have experienced that if I hadn’t worked so hard/raised children/looked out the window for those twenty years.” I would think that myself if I hadn’t actually done exactly the same thing as Taylor Lorenz for those twenty years.
Those who would then think “Pfft, I didn’t miss anything, who cares about ‘memes’ or ‘influencers'” aren’t reading a 384-page book about extreme online existence anyway, and this column isn’t about them. For many people, the thought continues in a different way, namely like the person who regretted not having noticed the important Twitter shitstorms. This has to do with FOMO, “fear of missing out”, the fear of missing something and not being able to have a say.
FOMO is not a stupid hobby for confused people who just need to re-arrange their priorities. It is nice at any age to be deeply involved in a topic with others: you have a shared history, you can laugh at all the allusions, construct complicated inside jokes, and you understand the world more or less completely. It is a very small world: a village, part of a school class, a spatially and temporally limited section of a subculture, but in this world you are completely oriented. FOMO is actually the sadness that it cannot always be like this. Almost everywhere we are the clueless outsiders who know nothing, understand nothing, cannot remember together and cannot laugh along.
In the past, most social worlds were invisible and inaccessible. (“In the past” here means something between the Neolithic period and before the Internet.) With the emergence of new ways of life and new media, more and more niches have become visible. More and more are also accessible regardless of where you live. All you need to be there is an infinite amount of time.
The pain of missing out is an appropriate reaction, because each of these insider worlds is fascinating and worth exploring, and someone should write thick books about it. Even if that would only increase the problems of missing out, because then everyone would have to read these interesting books. Having completely missed a development, an art movement, a meme, a huge area of life is not a failure. It is the normal state. Everyone else misses almost 100 percent of everything too, just in different places. This means that you shouldn’t say to other people, “Haha, what, you don’t know THAT, have you been living under a rock for the last ten years?”, but rather, “Ah, you don’t know that at all? Don’t plan anything for the next 800 hours, I’ll show you everything!”
It’s a bit more time-consuming, but if you never think to yourself again: “so embarrassing, I missed everything”, you can make up a few seconds.
Here Kathrin Passig writes every week about topics of the digital age. She is co-founder of the blog “Techniktagebuch”. www.kathrin.passig.de © downloads.normanposselt.com/copyright.pdf
