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ONE recent rainy night, I curled up on my couch with popcorn and Netflix Instant, ready
to spend a quiet night at home. The peace was sweet ² while it lasted. Soon,
my iPhone began flashing with notifications from a handful of social networking sites,
each a beacon of information about what my friends were doing.

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s the alerts came in, my mind began to race. Three friends, I learned, had arrived at a
music venue near my apartment. But why? What was happening there? Then I saw
pictures of other friends enjoying fancy milkshakes at a trendy restaurant. Suddenly, my
simple domestic pleasures paled in comparison with the things I could be doing.

The flurry of possibilities set off a rush of restlessness and indecision. I was torn between
nesting in my cozy roost or rallying for an impromptu rendezvous, and I just didn¶t know
what to do.

My problem is emblematic of the digital era. It¶s known as FOMO, or ³fear of missing
out,´ and refers to the blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while
skimming social media like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram. Billions of
Twitter messages, status updates and photographs provide thrilling glimpses of the daily
lives and activities of friends, ³frenemies,´ co-workers and peers.

The upside is immeasurable. Viewing postings from my friends scattered around the
country often makes me feel more connected to them, not less. News and photographs of
the bike rides, concerts, dinner parties and nights on the town enjoyed by people in my
New York social circle are invaluable as an informal to-do list of local recommendation.

But, occasionally, there is a darker side.

When we scroll through pictures and status updates, the worry that tugs at the corners of
our minds is set off by the fear of regret, according to Dan riely, author of ³Predictably
Irrational´ and a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.
He says we become afraid that we¶ve made the wrong decision about how to spend our
time.

Streaming social media have an immediacy that is very different from, say, a
conversation over lunch recounting the events of the previous weekend. When you see
that your friends are sharing a bottle of wine without you ² and at that very moment ²
³you can imagine how things could be different,´ Professor riely said.

It¶s like a near miss in real life. ³When would you be more upset?´ he asked. ³fter
missing your flight by two minutes or two hours?

³Two minutes, of course,´ he said. ³You can imagine how things could have been
different, and that really motivates us to behave in strange ways.´

Fear of missing out does not apply only to those with a hyperactive nightlife.

 friend who works in advertising told me that she felt fine about her life ² until she
opened Facebook. ³Then I¶m thinking, µI am 28, with three roommates, and oh, it looks
like you have a precious baby and a mortgage,¶ ´ she said. ³nd then I wanna die.´

On those occasions, she said, her knee-jerk reaction is often to post an account of a cool
thing she has done, or to upload a particularly fun picture from her weekend. This may
make her feel better ² but it can generate FOMO in another unsuspecting person.

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, the photo-sharing service, and of Hunch, a

recommendation engine, said, ³Social software is both the creator and the cure of
FOMO,´ adding, ³It¶s cyclical.´

Some creators of social apps say they have constructed their services to make people
keep coming back for more, but not for any insidious purpose.

³No one likes to perform in a vacuum,´ said Kevin Systrom, the chief executive
ofInstagram, a mobile photo-sharing application, which allows users to make comments
about pictures. The more creative or striking a photograph, the more likely it is to attract
favorable attention.

The feedback, Mr. Systrom said, can be slightly addictive. People using Instagram ³are
rewarded when someone likes it and you keep coming back,´ he said.
Whatever angst people may feel when they see someone else having a good time, he said,
is probably exaggerated by the overall effect of so many new social data streams pouring
into browsers and mobile phones at once.

³We aren¶t used to seeing the world as it happens,´ he said. ³We as humans can only
process so much data.´

Of course, fear of missing out is hardly new. It has been induced throughout history by
such triggers as newspaper society pages, party pictures and annual holiday letters ²
and e-mail ² depicting people at their festive best. But now, Ms. Fake said, instead of
receiving occasional polite updates, we get reminders around the clock, mainlined via the
device of our choosing.

SHERRY TURKLE, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author

of ³lone Together,´ says that as technology becomes ever more pervasive, our
relationship to it becomes more intimate, granting it the power to influence decisions,
moods and emotions.

³In a way, there¶s an immaturity to our relationship with technology,´ she said. ³It¶s still
evolving.´

We are struggling with the always-on feeling of connection that the Internet can provide,
she said, and we still need to figure out how to limit its influence on our lives. I asked
Professor Turkle what people could do to deal with this stress-inducing quandary. She
said she would tell herself to ³get a grip and separate myself from my iPhone.´

Easier said than done. I¶ve tried, but turning off my phone is nearly impossible ² I¶m not
yet ready for that step.

That evening, though, I flipped the phone over to hide its screen. That helped me ignore
what my friends were doing. I settled back to enjoy the evening, deciding not to venture
out into the cold and misty night. c

Electric venue
THE merican response to rising gas prices has been depressingly predictable. We¶re
shocked to see prices top $4 a gallon, as if it¶s never happened before. We demand that
something be done ² not to reduce our dependence on oil, but to cut the cost of a fi ll-up.
 Fortunately the White House is standing behind a goal that could genuinely transform
the nation¶s automotive fleet: putting one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.


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›c Times Topics: Environment |Hybrid Vehicles | Oil and Gasoline

The plan is ambitious, but it¶s more realistic than its critics maintain. Some argue that
because batteries can¶t yet propel a full-size car 500 miles on the highway and recharge
in a few minutes, we should give up and focus on squeezing better mileage out of existing
technology.

But many of the electric vehicles that will count toward President Obama¶s goal won¶t
run on electricity alone. They will combine batteries, electric motors and internal-
combustion engines to use as little gasoline as possible while still doing everything
mericans expect their cars to do. Electrification is not an all-or-nothing proposition ²
it¶s a process, the gradual replacement of gas-burning engines with batteries and electric
motors.

The process has already begun. Last December, the first mass-produced electric vehicles
of the 21st century ² the Chevrolet Volt, which runs on battery power for up to 50 miles
before a backup gasoline engine kicks in, and the Nissan Leaf, a purely battery-powered
five-passenger hatchback ² began shipping to customers. Tesla Motors has been selling
small numbers of expensive electric sports cars since 2008. Ford will soon come out
with a plug-in model of its own, and Toyota will release a plug-in version of the Prius
hybrid. (The current Prius can only run gas-free for short stretches and at low speeds.)

Purely electric cars like the Leaf never consume gasoline; plug-in hybrids like the Volt
can run primarily on electricity. Department of Transportation statistics show that 78
percent of mericans commute 40 miles or fewer a day, so most people who drive a Volt
won¶t need to burn any gas on a normal day.

When cars like these are being driven on a large scale, the benefits will be substantial.
The Electrification Coalition, an electric-vehicle advocacy group, estimates that if, by
2040, 75 percent of all miles driven in the United States are powered by electricity, oil
consumption by light-duty vehicles will drop from the current level of nearly nine million
barrels a day to two million. But getting there will require a mass rollout of these cars,
and it will take government assistance to make that happen.

The Obama administration already supports incentives to encourage drivers to buy

electric cars, and it has devoted $2.4 billion in stimulus money to the development of a
domestic electric-car industry. The president¶s 2012 budget request increases financing
for battery research and proposes good ideas for accelerating the spread of electric
vehicles, including the transformation of the existing $7,500 tax credit for the purchase
of a plug-in vehicle into a point-of-sale rebate, which would give buyers their refund
immediately rather than at tax time.

These investments may be too much to expect from a Congress that can barely keep the
government running. t the very least, however, President Obama and the Senate must
resist pressure to gut renewable energy programs in the name of reducing the deficit ²
an urge expressed most clearly in Representative Paul D. Ryan¶s budget plan, which
proposes a sizable and profoundly shortsighted cut in financing for energy research and
development.

We¶ve been here before. In the mid 1990s, compelled by California air-quality
regulations, automakers began leasing small numbers of electric cars, most famously
General Motors¶s EV1. But after the industry succeeded in weakening the regulations,
G.M. recalled the EV1s and crushed them in the desert ² a process chronicled in the
2006 documentary ³Who Killed the Electric Car?´

nd that wasn¶t the first aborted merican electric-vehicle effort. In the 1970s, the
government responded to the crisis in the oil markets with a surge in financing for
alternative energy projects. Scores of chemists turned their attention to battery science
and transformed the previously lifeless field.

Then oil became cheap again, and money for battery research dried up. Western battery
science languished while the Japanese, looking for better batteries for portable
electronics, followed up on the existing research and, in 1991, commercialized the
lithium-ion battery. Now the vast majority of the world¶s lithium-ion batteries, the most
valuable and essential component in an electric vehicle, are manufactured in sia. The
United States is scrambling to catch up.

Today, at universities like Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in
national laboratories like rgonne and Lawrence Berkeley, scientists are developing
technologies that could power a post-oil age ² batteries nearly as rich in usable energy
as gasoline, which would make cars like the Volt, with their gas-burning backup engines,
historical artifacts.

If we gut domestic clean-energy research, scientists in China or Germany or Japan will

finish this work. But it would be far better to stick with the program we¶ve begun ²
financing research into better batteries while deploying vehicles that replace gasoline
with electricity as much as possible ² and prove that when it comes to energy, merica
can, in fact, learn from its mistakes.

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