FOMOphobia is a network-connected installation that immerses the viewer in a visualization of the artist's real-time social networking anxiety, sounding alarms and keeping count of unhandled content.

Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is a form of social anxiety described as "a compulsive concern that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, or other satisfying event." FOMO is the result of our bombardment by modern networking, more insidious because we take an active part in it, simultaneously stressed out about and perpetuating our own addiction.

FOMOphobia brings this private guilt to the surface with glaring numeric displays and alarm bells. It exposes the artist's social networking burden and addiction, revealing both the accumulation and content of his social media messages. FOMOphobia provokes viewers to re-weigh the value of their relentless connectedness.

Like social media itself, FOMOphobia simultaneously attracts and repels. The installation features individual monitors for each of the artist's most insistent social media and chairs inviting the visitor to become immersed in the piece. Each monitor consists of a prominent numeric LED counter of the number of unread or unhandled items, paired with a clangorous electric bell that sounds whenever the number increments. A single line LED display scrolls through messages as they are received exposing the content of the artist's social networking.

At the debut of FOMOphobia there were five individual pieces representing Twitter, Facebook, email, sms/voicemail, and rss feeds (blog reader). Each piece consisted of a two-by-two foot wooden medallion of white mahogany inlaid into golden oak replicating in large-scale the familiar iPhone icons, a large red LED numeric display showing the number of unread messages inset into the upper right corner (also calling to mind the badge notifications on an iPhone), a red alphanumeric display along the bottom displaying incoming messages, and a red alarm bell hung above the piece.

As each message arrived, the corresponding piece rang for several seconds, the number of unread messages would be updated, and the message, sms, email, or tweet would be displayed.

Organization

• fomoclient runs on clients; retrieves data from server via https
• fomofetch runs on server; retrieves, processes data, and stores in mysql db
• fomoserver runs on server; serves data to clients via https
• A special gmail account is used as a Data Warehouse

Content Data Storage

• Database app serves data through CGI (or node.js) and https
• System has to track state to ensure multiple installations can draw from database without conflict
• FOMOclient is responsible for remembering state
• FOMOclient specifies last content ID retrieved (+1) and type of content needed

Display and timing

• FOMOclient retrieves unread count
  • If new count is greater than old count, change and flash numerical display and ring bell.
  • If new count is less than or equal old count, change numerical display
• FOMOclient retrieves content data
  • New content interrupts old queued content.
  • If there is new content, queue new content for display
  • If no new content, do nothing.
  • End of queued content is held briefly then blanks

Pacing

To provide interesting pacing as data is placed in the data store, clients get each message one by one: 1) check every X seconds for new content, 2) get one message, 3) increment the counter by one 4) ring the bell to announce new content, 5) display the content on the alpha LED, 6) wait a delay between 0 and Z second, and 7) immediately, check for new content, lapsing into (1) if no content is available.

Garbage Collection

The FOMOserver immediately deletes content from the Data Warehouse as soon as it retreives it. The fomoserver deletes content over a fixed age.

The clients connect to a local router for which they know the SSID and password. This router can be connected to an ethernet drop or to another router which serves as a client bridge to the WAN wireless router.

Self-Test

When clients power up, they display a visible self-test:

• wifi network status
• outside connection status
• connection to server status

Access to clients

With this configuration, the fomo clients are assigned DHCP by the WAP router, so there is no telling how they will be IP'd. One way to find likely candidates is to

wmodes$ nmap -sP 192.168.0.1/24

where I found them assigned as a suspicious block of 5 ajoining IPs.

They are accessible via ssh.

Logs

The clients (and the server) write their logs to /var/log/fomo.log

For the fomo server, use a server that is continuously up and has access to python, pip, etc. (This ruled out a Gandi Simple Hosting solution.) I used Debian, so adjust as necessary..

git clone https://github.com/wmodes/fomophobia.git
cd fomophobia

Make logs writable:

chown `whoami` /var/log/

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb python-flask
pip install -r requirements.txt

Test fetch:

cd ~/fomophobia/fomofetch
python fomofetch.py &
less /var/log/fomo.log

If everything seems to be working, create fomofetch as service:

cd ~/fomophobia/init.d
sudo cp fomofetch /etc/init.d/
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/fomofetch
sudo update-rc.d fomofetch defaults
sudo /etc/init.d/fomofetch start
less /var/log/fomo.log

Test server:

cd ~/fomophobia/fomoserver
python fomoserver.py
less /var/log/fomo.log

TODO: Flask installation