Smartphone Addiction: A Media Hype or a Real Social Problem? (2013)

Undergraduate: Yiyang Li

Faculty Advisor: Katie Walker
Department: Mathematical Decision Science

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With everything gadgets possess to easily catch the customers¿ eye, smartphones are leading another persuasive technology revolution just like the laptops in the early 2000s. Basic phones should pale in comparison with smartphone devices, whose eye-catching advertisements present not only the perfect design but also the user-friendly elements including faster Internet browsers, more delicate graphic displays and world-class operation systems. Through tapping, clicking and scrolling, users experience a sense of well connectedness and novelty. However, smartphones sometimes do more harm than good. Despite the benefits of hyper-connectivity, portability and individuality, if users overuse them, smartphones could become accomplices of exposing users to distraction or addiction. Many articles confirm that smartphone users experience distraction, but of them concludes that smartphone usage causes addiction. Meanwhile, the word ¿addiction¿ is often attached to smartphone overuse in the media. In respond to the paradox, this research is aimed to examine the criteria of addiction from the neuroscience and psychological-behavioral perspectives in order to assess whether the various degrees of smartphone usage could fit in that category. In this paper, I use the past studies, vulnerabilities theories from brain sciences and psychological-behavioral factors to argue that smartphone addiction is a potential risk for the users.