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DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE

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For at least some of us, the social mediated version of ourselves becomes the predominant way we experience the world. As Time magazine has noted, “Experiences don’t feel fully real” until we have “tweeted them or tumbled them or YouTubed them—and the world has congratulated you for doing so.”1 Social media is all about us—we are simultaneously the creators and the subjects. But the flip side of promoting our own experiences on social media as the most awesome happenings ever (and too bad you aren’t here) is the social anxiety associated with reading about other people’s experiences and realizing that you are not actually there.

The problem is called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and it has been defined as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out—that your peers are doing, in the know about or in possession of more or something better than you.”2 There are plenty of platforms for posting about ourselves and anxiously creeping on others—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, and Vine are just a few of the sites that can feed our FOMO problem.

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The fear of missing out has been around long before social media was invented. Bragging, photos, postcards, and those holiday letters have usually put the most positive spin on people’s lives. But social media and mobile technology make being exposed to the interactions you missed a 24/7 phenomenon. There is potentially always something better you could have/should have been doing, right?

With FOMO, there is a “desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing,” so the person suffering from the anxiety continues to be tethered to social media, tracking “friends” and sacrificing time that might be spent having in-person, unmediated experiences.3 All of this time on social media may not make us happy. For example, a study by University of Michigan researchers found that the use of Facebook (the most popular social media site) makes college students feel worse about themselves. The two-week study found that the more the students used Facebook, the more two components of well-being declined: how people feel moment-to-moment, and how satisfied they are with their lives—regardless of how many Facebook “friends” they had in their network.4

Studies about happiness routinely conclude that the best path to subjective well-being (i.e., happiness) and life satisfaction is having a community of close personal relationships. Social psychologists Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener acknowledge that the high use of mobile phones, text messaging, and social media is evidence that people want to connect. But they also explain that “we don’t just need relationships: we need close ones.” They conclude, “The close relationships that produce the most happiness are those characterized by mutual understanding, caring, and validation of the other person as worthwhile.”5 Thus, frequent contact isn’t enough to produce the kinds of relationships that produce the most happiness.

Ironically, there has never been a medium better than the Internet and its social media platforms to bring people together. How many people do you know who met online and went on to have successful friendships or romantic relationships? How often have social media connections enhanced close relationships for you? Still, according to Diener and Biswas-Diener, maintaining close relationships may require a “vacation” from social media from time to time, experiencing something together with a friend or friends. Of course (and we hate to say it), you will still need to text, message, e-mail, or call to arrange that date.

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THE INTERNET—the vast network of telephone and cable lines, wireless connections, and satellite systems designed to link and carry digital information worldwide—was initially described as an information superhighway. This description implied that the goal of the Internet was to build a new media network—a new superhighway—to replace traditional media (e.g., books, newspapers, television, and radio)—the old highway system. In many ways, the original description of the Internet has turned out to be true. The Internet has expanded dramatically from its initial establishment in the 1960s to an enormous media powerhouse that encompasses—but has not replaced—all other media today.

In this chapter, we examine the many dimensions of the Internet, digital media, and convergence. We will:

As you read through this chapter, think back to your first experiences with the Internet. What was your first encounter like? What were some of the things you remember using the Internet for then? How did it compare with your first encounters with other mass media? How has the Internet changed since your first experiences with it? For more questions to help you think through the role of the Internet in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.