FOMO Is Real And A Powerful Force

Recently I watched the Hulu documentary "Fyre Fraud."  Maybe you remember in 2017 there was this "music festival" called the Fyre Festival created by some guy named Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule.  All these rich Millennials went to this island in the Bahamas where all these bands were supposed to play...only no bands and instead of expensive villas they had FEMA tents and instead of fancy meals there were cheese sandwiches.  The whole thing was a disaster and McFarland wound up in prison, though not so much for the festival itself but financial crimes stemming from fundraising for the festival.

Anyway, at one point it talks about FOMO--Fear Of Missing Out.  They did a lot of social media promotion for this festival including having one of the Kardashian/Jenner women post something about it.  They especially courted "influencers" on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter etc.  Influencers are people with lots of followers because they're so hip and in fashion.  And so all these dipshits then got all excited and wanted to go to this thing because they were afraid of missing out.

For the other half of my thought process, recently I started watching Season 2 of The Orville on Hulu as well.  The first season aired in fall 2017 and basically ended by the new year.  Fox in its infinite wisdom decided not to start Season 2 until December 30th of 2018.  So pretty much a full year between seasons despite that it's on network TV not streaming.

Anyway, I got thinking that the problem with shows like that is I just don't care enough to watch them right away.  There's no FOMO for me.  In part because I don't really like the show all that much but also because none of my buddies really like it.  I know at least one of the Geek Twins reviled the first season and my brother wasn't really into it either despite being a huge Trek fan.  Obviously no one at work watches it either so there's no "talk at the water cooler" about it either--if we had a water cooler so I didn't have to bring my own filtered water.

I used to watch The Flash on CW in large part because it was fun speculating on things with Michael Offutt on Twitter and his blog.  When we stopped doing that there was no real reason to watch the show anymore because I didn't like it that much and there was again no fear I was missing out on anything.

Contrast that to say Game of Thrones which shamelessly decided to wait over a year for the final season despite that filming wrapped months ago.  I do want to watch that because I don't want to miss out on the end of the series.  And I'm sure a lot of people are the same way.  That's why so many people watched the last episode of M*A*S*H and Cheers and Seinfeld and of course why hundreds of millions of people watch the Super Bowl, though mostly because they don't want to miss out on the commercials.

Books and movies can be the same way.  People read the Harry Potter or Twilight or Hunger Games books because "everyone else" is.  Billions of people will watch Avengers 4 and Star Wars 9 this year because "everyone else" is.

So you have to admit FOMO is an important thing in entertainment.  You can also call it "peer pressure" though then I think of after-school specials with some bad actor trying to force another to take drugs.  Whether we like it or not, we all watch or read or do things because we don't want to be the only one who isn't.

If you're lucky you can be like GRR Martin not write your anticipated sequel for 10 years and still have millions of people salivating to read it because they don't want to miss out.  Most of us are not so lucky.  If Eric Filler didn't publish another book, how many people would care?  Between 0 and 1.

FOMO is definitely a big part of psychology if you want to understand why things are popular.  Unfortunately it can go horribly wrong like with the Fyre Festival.

Now if only people had FOMO about voting; maybe there would be more than 30% turnout for elections.