Addicted to Your Smartphone? Here's What to Do
Why smartphones hook us in, plus tips on reclaiming your time and concentration.
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD
I'll admit it: I check my smartphone compulsively. And the more I use it, the more often the urge to look at it hits me.
In the orthodontist's office. Walking my kids to school. In meetings. Even while making breakfast. Sometimes it is in my hand before I even know what I'm searching for. Sometimes I tap the screen absent mindedly -- looking at my email, a local blogger, my calendar, and Twitter.
I'm not the only one struggling with this very modern compulsion. According to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center, 46% of all American adults now own a smartphone -- up a whopping 25% from 2011.
And smartphone use can get very heavy. In a study of 1,600 managers and professionals, Leslie Perlow, PhD, the Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, found that:
- 70% said they check their smartphone within an hour of getting up.
- 56% check their phone within an hour of going to sleep.
- 48% check over the weekend, including on Friday and Saturday nights.
- 51% check continuously during vacation.
- 44% said they would experience "a great deal of anxiety" if they lost their phone and couldn't replace it for a week.
"The amount of time that people are spending with the new technology, the apparent preoccupation, raises the question 'why?'" says Peter DeLisi, academic dean of the information technology leadership program at Santa Clara University in California. "When you start seeing that people have to text when they're driving, even though they clearly know that they're endangering their lives and the lives of others, we really have to ask what is so compelling about this new medium?"
Hook or Habit?
Whether smartphones really "hook" users into dependency remains unclear.
But "we already know that the Internet and certain forms of computer use are addictive," says David Greenfield, PhD, a West Hartford, Conn.,psychologist and author of Virtual Addiction: Help for Netheads, Cyber Freaks, and Those Who Love Them.
"And while we're not seeing actual smartphone addictions now," Greenfield says, "the potential is certainly there."
The smartphone is a vital technology to society nowadays. People all over the world have been getting addicted to using their smartphones. The three key stake-holders of the are the customers (users), cell carriers and the handset makers.
ReplyDeleteThe touchscreen and the apps help make the addiction stronger. Although most apps are paid, many useful and addictive ones are still free. The battery life of the phone has also been getting better and better, enabling the users to spend more time of their phones before they run out of battery. Most people have all their social medias on their smartphones, which doesn't help stop the addiction. 44% of people from a survey said that they would experience a great deal of anxiety if they lost their phone and couldn't replace it within a week.
Smartphones cover many areas of application. These include business (checking emails or researching), home & leisure (gaming apps and music) and education (research).
Social impacts and ethical issues. There are positive and negative impacts from using smartphones. The positive ones are it is easier to keep in touch with friends and family due to the fact that u can store many apps on a single smartphone, it makes it easier to carry work around if u just save it on your smartphone, and it is easier and faster to communicate to people through touchscreen texting. The negative effects are inappropriate use of the camera, smartphone addiction, and using the 3G on your phone to go to explicit websites on the internet. To solve these problems there should be age verification on smartphones and also people should be managing the time they spend on their phones.
Has detailed and clear understanding. There are correct references to stakeholders. Most areas of applications are described. IT terminology is used corrected and is mostly liked to the ITGS issues and impacts.
DeleteScore: 5/6
i give this a 5/6. It was a very good analysis but you should have more ethical issues
ReplyDelete