Exploring subjective sociocultural understandings of “fear of missing out” (FoMO) and the unsettled self in a time of deep mediatization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The public sphere has become increasingly digitalized and transformed by the intermeshing of social media platforms and mobile devices cultivating reimagined selves. The negative impact of living in a deeply mediatized world has fostered a phenomenon both in the public mind and academic discourse known as “fear of missing out” or by its acronym FoMO. Historically, and consistent with the “media effects” tradition, hundreds of studies have highlighted the psychological and behavioral dimensions of this construct, noting its negative effects. In opposition to the “effects” paradigmatic studies, we utilize social constructionist mediatization theory and Q methodology as frameworks for audience research that foreground subjectivity and understandings concerning the mediations of FoMO as a sociocultural construct. A total of 37 millennials and post-millennials Q sorted 55 statements resulting in three selfhood factors. Both dominant and counter “hegemonic” accounts were uncovered in the factors, respectively, identified as envy/exclusion, grounded vigilance, and managed vulnerability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".