Last Sunday night's supermoon and combined eclipse occurred only five times in the 20th century. This created quite a stir on social media. Every major social media platform had coverage of the rare sighting. Snapchat featured a story for the event, Instagram had a sponsored post for the event, and Facebook and Twitter’s top trending topic was the supermoon. I thought it was very interesting to see an event like this go so viral. We have rare occurrences happen in the sky all the time, but many people don’t bat an eye. I believe this comes as a direct result of where we are on social media as a whole. If we did not have friends on social media would we still use it? Absolutely not—and there would be no social element.
I believe in a thing called fear of missing out (FOMO). I think the supermoon was built up by news channels that wanted an interesting story, which then generated conversations about the event on social media sites. I believe people are so interconnected with their followers that they do not want to miss out on something everyone seems to care about. With that, a picture or some sort of documentation becomes a necessary part of the equation. We feel if we don’t document the event in some way, that we missed out on something. Simply watching the eclipse is not enough. I will not generalize about everyone. I get it some people simply enjoyed earth's wonder without posting it, but I guarantee you they were atlas checking to see what other people were saying about it at one point or another.
Everyone wants to have a say on exciting topics. Simply posting a picture about the eclipse and making a comment are all of the satisfaction people need. As long as they feel the security that they didn’t miss out on something their social community found important. This will fuel the conversation for my next social media blog about the nature of posting. As for the media coverage—I am all for it. I am happy to see people appreciating our amazing world that we live in, even if it is only because they didn’t want to miss out. The next time the supermoon occurs, I am curious to see where we are with our social media platforms, and how we are as a whole. I hope you still follow me in 33 years!
