Kaya Fung is a Senior at Miami University studying Strategic Communication. Her Honors Senior Project examines dimensions of social media usage, specifically related to automatic and unconscious social media behaviors. Drawing from a range of literature in the Communications, Psychology and other related fields, her project aimed to learn more about the relationship between automatic social media behaviors and experiences of both mindfulness and fear of missing out (FOMO). Her research was guided by two research questions: How is automatic social media behavior correlated to self reported feelings of FOMO? And how prevalent is automatic social media usage among Miami University students? To research these questions, she wrote and distributed an original survey to students at Miami University who answered a variety of questions related to their social media usage. She garnered 151 student responses and examined the data using statistical testing. Notably, she discovered a statistically significant relationship between automaticity and self-reported FOMO. She also discovered a weak positive correlation between hours spent on one’s phone daily and their reported automaticity. Several students opted to share additional experiences with social media, with one student reflecting on the mindfulness she experienced when losing her phone for a few days, likening social media to the “Venom Symbiote” from the Spider Man franchise. This vivid anecdote illustrates one of the core findings of this project: that social media automaticity was highly prevalent among students surveyed. She will continue her work as a Communications researcher as a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2024.
Author(s): Kaya Fung, Media, Journalism and Film Major
Advisor(s): Adam Rottinghaus, Media, Journalism and Film and John Tchernev, Media, Journalism, and Film
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