5. Discussion
5.1. Summary
Social media utilities have made it easier than ever to know what one’s friends, family, and acquaintances are doing, buying, and talking about. In many ways these social affordances are positive, highlighting opportunities and connecting people. However, because time is limited, this means people must also miss out on a substantial subset of potentially rewarding experiences made salient by social media use. This double-edged quality of social media has driven popular interest in and increased speculation about the nature of fear of missing out. Although little is empirically known about fear of missing out at this stage, the present re- search provides a number of in sights into how fear of missing out can be reliably assessed and how it constellates with motivational, behavioral ,well-being, and demographic factors.
In the first study were cruited a large and diverse sample of participants who rated a pool of items drafted to reflect in dividable differences in fear of missing out. Guided by our consideration of the extant writings about the phenomenon we pursued an empirically rigorous and data-driven approach to create a self-report measure .As a result of strategic item selection and testing we identified ten items that form anew psychometric instrument to tap into individual differences in FoMO. This first of its kind assessment, the FoMOs, is a brief and easy to administer assessment that is sensitive and quantifies FoMO for those who evince low, moderate, and high levels of the fear of missing out construct.
In the second study we collected a larger, nationally representative sample and investigated fear of missing out against the back- drop of SDT, a macro theory of human motivation and extant research exploring motives for social media use. Our goal was to in vest gate de Mo graphic variability in FoMO as well as to understand its links to motivational and well-being factors. Results indicated that the young, and young males in particular, tended towards higher levels of FoMO. This pair of findings conceptually replicated and lends empirical weight to earlier industry reports (JWT,2011,2012 )that suggested FoMO tends to be a phenomenon grappled with by younger people.