FOMO-Centricity: How Social Media's Dark Designs Cause Users to Reluctantly Give Up their Data

Abstract

This thesis explores the link between the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and reluctant privacy-compromising behaviours on social media. We first conducted a literature review which laid the groundwork for FoMO as a possible explanation for a gap between users' privacy attitudes and behaviours. To better understand this phenomenon, we used Grounded Theory to conduct and analyze semi-structured interviews with 25 participants. We found strong evidence that participants experience ambivalence in their participation behaviours and feel pressured to participate even when they have privacy concerns to avoid missing out. We present an empirically-based high level theory describing the cyclical relationship between FoMO-centric design and privacyrelated participatory reluctance, and identify three main participatory dimensions.

Advances in problematic usage of the internet research – A narrative review by experts from the European network for problematic usage of the internet

“…Arguably, attention-focused designs intend generate, or possibly exploit, potentially addictive features (e.g., those connected to scrolling, likes, and content-sharing) [149,150] and conditioned responses (e.g. vibrations or red icons for notifications) [143,[151][152][153][154] that may induce individuals to continue using services.…”