Background: The fear of missing out (FoMO) on social media refers to the apprehension that online content and interactions from others are unseen and reacted to in a timely fashion. FoMO can become problematic, leading to anxiety, interrupted sleep, lack of concentration and dependence on social media to generate gratification. The literature has mainly focused on understanding the FoMO experience, factors contributing to it and its consequences. Method: In this paper, we build on previous research and develop a FoMO Reduction (FoMO-R) approach that embraces technical elements such as autoreply, filtering, status, education on how FoMO occurs and skills on how to deal with it; e.g., self-talk and checklists. We evaluate the method through focus groups and a diary study involving 30 participants who self-declared to experience FoMO regularly. Results: The results show that the method was accepted by the participants and helped them to manage their FoMO. They also show that a set of extra functionalities in social media design is needed so that users can manage FoMO more effectively. Conclusion: FoMO can be reduced through socio-technical approaches, joining both social and technical skills, and literacy on how social media are designed and how social interactions should happen on them.

Fear of missing out, (hereafter referred to as FoMO), is increasingly becoming an issue of concern in relation to the use of Social Network Sites (SNSs). Despite its importance, the effects of FoMO continue to receive limited attention, while guidance on how SNSs design is responsible for developing should and combatting it, remains inadequate. In this position paper, we argue that dual responsibility of SNSs design. We report on initial results of a multiphase empirical study which was undertaken to examine the features of social networks that may contribute to triggering FoMO, and to explore how future SNSs can be designed to aid people manage their FoMO. The study involved three focus group sessions and a diary study. We argue that future SNSs shall support interaction styles and protocols and their agreement and adherence processes to enable people prevent and combat FoMO and present styles for doing that.

Social media provides a platform for information sharing and dissemination and has speedily become a popular method for individuals to relate to others regardless of the time and geographical distance. However, this wealth of connectivity and availability of information may lead to the experience of the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) that typically refers to a preoccupation of the users of social media about lost opportunities when they are offline or unable to connect and communicate as wished. Despite the recognition of the concept, studies around FoMO have used offline data collection techniques such as interviews, focus groups and surveys. This has led to a limited understanding of the lived FoMO experience and a rather simplified and coarse-grained view of the concept. In this paper, we delve into the specifics and nuances of FoMO through multi-stage qualitative research, including interviews, diary study and three focus group sessions and elaborate upon the concept and determine its various manifestations and classification. The lived experience is mainly gathered through a diary study. We present five main classifications characterising FoMO and develop an ecology for it.

Social Network Sites (SNSs) are meant to facilitate interaction between people. The design of SNSs employs persuasive techniques with the aim of enhancing the user experience but also increasing interaction and user retention. Examples include the personalisation of content, temporarily available feeds, and notification and alert features. Socialness is now being embedded in new paradigms such as the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems where devices can link people to each other and increase relatedness and group creation. One of the phenomena associated with such persuasion techniques is the experience of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO). FoMO typically refers to the preoccupation of SNS users with being deprived of interaction while offline. The salience, mood modification and conflict typically experienced as part of FoMO, are symptoms of digital addiction (DA). Despite recognition of the widespread experience of FoMO, existing research focuses on user psychology to interpret it. The contribution of SNS design in triggering FoMO remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a multi-stage qualitative research including interviews, a diary study and three focus group sessions to explore the relationship between SNS features and FoMO. Our findings demonstrate how the different SNS features act as persuasion triggers for certain kinds of FoMO. Also, we suggest features that could be introduced to social network sites to allow individuals to manage FoMO and identify the principles and challenges associated with engineering them.

In this paper, we consider a coded cooperative communication network with multiple energy-harvesting (EH) relays. In order to adequately address the problem of error propagation due to the erroneous decoding at the relays, as in the case of conventional decode and forward (DF) relaying protocol, we propose coded cooperative schemes with hard information relaying (HIR) and soft information relaying (SIR) strategies. The performance of the relayed communication with EH relay depends crucially on the channel decoding capability at the relay, channel gains at the source–relay and relay–destination links, and ultimately on the power-splitting ratio of the relay EH receiver. The exact closed-form expression for the outage probability performance of the coded cooperative scheme with HIR strategy and relay selection (CC-HIR-RS) is derived for both cases, namely for constant and optimal power-splitting ratios. Concerning the coded cooperative scheme with SIR strategy, a Rayleigh Gaussian log likelihood ratio-based model is used to describe the soft estimated symbols at the output of the relay soft encoder. Directives are provided to determine the model parameters, and, accordingly, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the equivalent one-hop relaying channel is derived. A closed-form expression for the outage probability performance of the proposed coded cooperative scheme with SIR and relay selection (CC-SIR-RS) is derived. In addition, a fuzzy logic-based power-splitting scheme in EH relay applying SIR is proposed. The fading coefficients of the source–relay and relay–destination links and distance between source and relay node are considered as input parameters of the fuzzy logic system to obtain an appropriate power-splitting ratio that leads to a quasi-optimal SNR of the equivalent end-to-end channel. Monte Carlo simulations are presented to demonstrate the validity of the analytical results, and a comparison between the performance of the CC-HIR-RS scheme with constant and optimized power-splitting ratios and that of the CC-SIR-RS scheme with constant and fuzzy logic-based power-splitting ratios is provided.