Smartphone separation anxiety is growing problem, says scientist
Smartphone separation
anxiety is growing problem, says scientist
Do you use your phone constantly?
TOM BAWDEN Published: 17:39 Tuesday 15 August 2017
Smartphones are so central to our lives that being
separated from them for any length of time can put people into a high state of
anxiety – and the problem, it seems, is only going to get worse.
Researchers have been looking into the reasons for our
‘smartphone separation anxiety’ – known as nomophobia – and found that it has
little to do with being unable to make or receive a call.
The main reason, they found, is to do with the key role
our smartphones play in our overall identity by recording numerous memories
that act as an extension of ourselves.
Social media scrapbooks
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and
Twitter provide huge streams of photographs and comments from friends,
relatives and heroes which act as a vast and powerful scrapbook of our lives.
For many people, posting about their actions on social
media has become a key part of their experience of an event and, in turn, the
way they remember them, the study finds. And being without a smartphone means
you can’t be posting about your current activities, researchers say.
“As smartphones evoke more personal memories, users
extend more of their identity onto them,” said Dr Ki Joon Kim, of the City
University of Hong Kong.
“When users perceive smartphones as their extended
selves, they are more likely to become attached to the devices, which, in turn,
leads to nomophobia by heightening the phone proximity-seeking tendency,” he
added.
Separation anxiety ‘likely to increase’
Dr Kim is concerned that nomophobia could become even
stronger in the future as technology becomes increasingly personalized – and
warns people not to become too dependent on their smartphones.
“Recent smartphone and app development seems to
inevitable increase users’ attachment, as the technology and related services
become increasingly personalized and customizable.
“This suggests that users should be conscious not to
become overly dependent on smartphones while benefitting from the smartness of
the technology,” he said.
Google’s photo service – which curates the user’s daily
life by automatically classifying their image files and generating collages and
animations from them – is a good example of this kind of tailored technology,
Dr Kim said.
The research is published in the journal Cyberpsychology,
Behavior and Social Networking.
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