The Dark Side of Technology: the Issue of Smartphone Addiction

Now, we are going to define what is a smartphone and the differences between mobile phones. Both are mobile but the main difference is that smartphones can access the Internet all the time. Those devices provide information on your social identity, status but also almost everything you like, your interests. Through smartphones people can be provided by “ numerous gratifications, such as sociability, entertainment, information finding, time management, coping strategies and social identity maintenance'. 

Nowadays smartphones have almost taken the place of cellphones, but to some extent they replaced computers, cameras and lots of different devices. This makes smartphones as a device with plenty of functions that can be accessed whenever and wherever people want. It allows people send e-mails, play video games, take photos and videos, listen to music, check the newspaper, interact with people on social medias, plan appointments.

Smartphones has become so important for people that researches showed that some of them feel truly attached to their phone and if they get separated from it, their anxiety rises. But it doesn’t always mean that smartphones bring anxiety, sometimes they can bring joy, comfort and satisfaction in times of stress, people can feel more secured. 

In other words, people and their smartphones start to have a “deep connection” between them which leads potentially to an addicted behavior. This potential addiction is still rising as technology is constantly evolving so that people acquire an addictive behavior more and more.

Even though this disorder is not always recognized as it should be, some studies tried to estimate the range of smartphone addiction. Several percentages came up and one specific study showed that “48% of undergraduate university students were smartphone addicted, but the most frequent percentage is between 10% and 20%.

We cannot deny those studies, but we can certainly put them in perspective. By using their own measures or by relying on the people’s own perception of their addiction, we can therefore admit that there will always be a bias. It is very difficult to use objective methods, scales, grades to determine smartphone addiction. That’s why if there is no context, those numbers, percentages… would be worthless.

Most of studies made around smartphone addiction were conducted in Asia, for instance in Korea, China or Taiwan in the last years. The reasons why they were mainly conducted in that geographical region are still unclear, but suggestions have been made about the difficulty for some people to socialize with others because of their lack of time which leads to a higher use of devices like smartphones. Still, those cultural trends or hobbits can also be influenced by their sociocultural context such as their work, school or social environment which affects people’s interactions with everything.