Are Smartphones addictive?

If Smartphones are addictive, certainly we don’t notice. I started thinking about this as I came across the below article. http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/08/08/social-media-the-pursuit-of-happiness/

“In 2010, students at the University of Maryland were asked to give up all media for 24 hours. This included access to social networks and ‘i’ devices. Among the conclusions of the study by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) was that many of the 200 students studied showed signs associated with drug and alcohol addiction. These included withdrawal, craving and anxiety. One student reported:

“Although I started the day feeling good, I noticed my mood started to change around noon. I started to feel isolated and lonely. I received several phone calls that I could not answer. By 2pm I began to feel the urgent need to check my email, and even thought of million ideas of why I had to. I felt like a person on a deserted island…. I noticed physically, that I began to fidget, as if I was addicted to my iPod and other media devices, and maybe I am.””

Research by Retrevo Gadgetology  has studied people’s behavior on Social Networking sites. Younger people , under 25 years, said  32% check in first thing in a morning, 27% said they sometimes check when they wake up during the night and 19% saying they log on any time they wake up during the night. Overall 45% of all the people that have been surveyed  said they check Facebook or Twitter after getting into bed. Another study from the UK OFCOM shows that  51% of adults and 65% of teenagers admitted using their phones when with friends or family with 23% of adults and 34% of teenagers using them at meal times.

What is addiction? addiction may refer to a substance dependence (e.g. drug, alcohol  addiction) or behavioral addiction (e.g. gambling addiction). People with an addiction do not have control over what they are doing, taking or using. Their addiction may reach a point at which it is harmful.

The real problem I see is….The more we use smartphones, the more we want to use them…..The mystery is, do Smartphones hook us into a dependency and we just don’t know it?

David Greenfield- PhD, a West Hartford, Conn., psychologist and author of Virtual Addiction: Help for Netheads, Cyber Freaks- say “while we're not seeing actual smartphone addictions now, the potential is certainly there."