In case you were getting too comfortable, there is a new social media-induced anxiety disorder in town. MOMO, the more complex and paranoid cousin of FOMO, has arrived on the Internet.
MOMO stands for the" mystery of missing out."
Unlike FOMO, which causes users to feel regret when they see that their friends are doing something fun on social media, MOMO is caused by the absence of these "my life is better than yours" posts. To put simply, MOMO happens when a user's friends are not posting on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
When experiencing MOMO, a user has no idea what fun things their friends are doing. Consequently, a user cannot even properly experience FOMO because they do not know what they are missing out on. The logic goes that if your friends are not posting on social media outlets, they must be having an obscene amount of fun and are too busy to dabble in mundane activities like Instagram. Another, more paranoid conclusion about MOMO is that a user's friends are deliberately hiding their outings from them as a way to distance themselves.
Though this all sounds a bit overdramatic and simply a ridiculous product of our social media- obsessed age, the MOMO effect has a history dating back to the onset of text messaging, according to Professor Mizuko Ito.
A cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, Professor Mizuko Ito says that people are now conditioned to be in constant communication with their acquaintances and are disturbed when that communication stops. If you have come to expect certain social updates, the absence of them signals that something is amiss.
Dr. Terri Apter, a psychologist at Cambridge University, states that MOMO is an evolutionary sensation that has shifted from the playground to social media.
"[MoMo]'s in a new context, but it's not new," she explains. "It's recognized that one of our biggest necessities is not just having what we need in order to survive - or even be comfortable - we need things that allow us to feel that we're part of our peer culture. That includes information."
Perhaps a little bit of MOMO will be beneficial for our social media-crazed age, teaching us that the mystery of under sharing is much more interesting than the transparency of over sharing.
