Social media connect us in so many different ways, expanding our human interactions beyond the limits of meeting in person. As noted in Chapter 2, social media include any blogs, collaborative projects, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds that expand our social horizons. But while social media connect us, they disconnect us in other ways, taking up time in which we might experience real physical connection and replacing it with short, highly mediated messages. With social media, we are both the media and the subject, and we create the online version of ourselves.

For at least some of us, the social mediated version of ourselves becomes the predominant way we experience the world. As Time magazine noted in 2014, “Experiences don’t feel fully real” until you have “tweeted them or tumbled them or YouTubed them—and the world has congratulated you for doing so.”1 The flip side of promoting our own experiences on social media as the most awesome happenings ever (with the added subtext of “too bad you aren’t here”) is the social anxiety associated with reading about other people’s experiences—and the accompanying realization that you are not actually there.

The problem is called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and one report defines it 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 This fear has been around long before social media was invented. Photos, postcards, holiday family letters, and plain old bragging 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. Exposure to a hypothetical better experience or better life is potentially constant.

According to a report in Computers in Human Behavior, 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 Some related social media problems can get even more serious. A study by University of Michigan researchers found that the use of Facebook (the most popular social media site) makes people feel worse about themselves. The study of college students over two weeks found that the more they used Facebook, the more two components of well-being declined: how people feel moment-to-moment and how satisfied they are with their lives. These declines occurred regardless of how many Facebook “friends” they had in their network.4

THE IDEA THAT SOCIAL MEDIA COULD BE CREATING NEW FORMS OF ANXIETY AND UNDERMINING OUR HAPPINESS PRESENTS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION ABOUT OUR CULTURE TO INVESTIGATE. For this case study, we will look at social media in our lives and whether they help expand our friendships, undermine our social well-being, or offer a mixed result of good and bad outcomes.

As detailed in Chapter 1 and throughout the book, a media-literate perspective involves mastering five overlapping critical stages that build on each other: (1) description: paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study; (2) analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage; (3) interpretation: asking and answering the “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about our findings; (4) evaluation: arriving at a judgment about whether something is good, bad, poor, or mediocre, which involves subordinating our personal views to the critical assessment resulting from the first three stages; and (5) engagement: taking some action that connects our critical interpretations and evaluations with our responsibility as citizens.