Nomophobia - or no mobile phone phobia - the onset of severe anxiety on losing access to your smartphone has been talked about for years. But in Asia, the birthplace of the selfie stick and the emoji, psychologists say smartphone addiction is fast on the rise and the addicts are getting younger.
A recent study surveyed almost 1,000 students in South Korea, where 72% of children own a smartphone by the age of 11 or 12 and spend on average 5.4 hours a day on them - as a result about 25% of children were considered addicted to smartphones. The study, to be published in 2016 found that stress was an important indicator of your likelihood to get addicted.
Asia and its 2.5bn smartphone users provides a stream of phone-related "mishap news", such as the Taiwanese tourist who had to be rescued after she walked off a pier while checking Facebook on her phone. Or the woman from China's Sichuan province rescued by fire fighters after falling into a drain while looking at her phone.
They may make for slapstick headlines but in Singapore too the concern is that those most vulnerable are getting younger. With its population of just 6 million, it has one of the world's highest smartphone penetration rates. It also has specialists in digital addiction, a cyber wellness clinic and a campaign to see digital addiction be formally recognised.
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When Danny Reagan was 13, he began exhibiting signs of what doctors usually associate with drug addiction. He became agitated, secretive and withdrew from friends. He had quit baseball and Boy Scouts, and he stopped doing homework and showering.
But he was not using drugs. He was hooked on YouTube and video games, to the point where he could do nothing else. As doctors would confirm, he was addicted to his electronics.
"After I got my console, I kind of fell in love with it," Danny, now 16 and a junior in a Cincinnati high school, said. "I liked being able to kind of shut everything out and just relax."
Danny was different from typical plugged-in American teenagers. Psychiatrists say internet addiction, characterized by a loss of control over internet use and disregard for the consequences of it, affects up to 8 percent of Americans and is becoming more common around the world.
Show-e-ring? Is that some kind of connected device?
Related: How Facebook Can Be Addictive
Asia's Smartphone Addiction
In South Korea, a Rehab Camp for Internet-Addicted Teenagers
Chinese Teen Dies as a Result of Internet Addiction Camp
World Health Organization Will Recognize "Gaming Disorder"
World Health Organization Officially Lists "Gaming Disorder" in ICD
Why is There a 'Gaming Disorder' but No 'Smartphone Disorder?'
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 07 2015, @06:16PM
I landed in the Emergency Room during the winter as a result of hanging out online too much.
I wasn't getting any sleep. So many HN articles that demonstrably help me with my work, see. I knew I was but hours from a manic episode so I dialed 9-1-1 when I realized I could not walk to the hospital, requested "Non-Emergency Psychiatric Transport".
They gave me two milligrams of Ativan, I slept for 24 hours, went right back to Hacker News.
Eventually I was shadowbanned by their bot. I at first intended to request unbannination then decided that my forced vacation really was for the best.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday September 07 2015, @06:48PM
Does that mean you're a refugee?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 08 2015, @06:25AM
I have a new one I'm working on:
I could tell you what I'm working on but then I'd have to kill you.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 08 2015, @06:28AM
That was supposed to go to a parking page.
In any case, warplife.com is not the Stealth Mode Startup I refer to. While I expect to ship my iOS App, I don't give a rat's ass as to when I ship it. That I will ship it at all is the result of wanting some friends to check it out but I'm not particularly motivated to maximize AAPL shareholder value by contributing Yet Another iOS App (YAIA) to the iTunes Store.
(Isn't iTunes a music player?)
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @08:43PM
Except your incident has absolutely nothing to do with hanging out online. You could have been watching TV or reading books all night for the same result. "Insomnia on a computer" is not distinct from insomnia.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 07 2015, @10:48PM
I at times suffer insomnia. I experience all manner of different kinds of insomnia. Recall that I'm a wingnut.
What I was referring to in my specific instance of Internet Addiction in reality is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. That's quite a different thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 08 2015, @12:44AM
Have I mentioned today that I am Gay?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 08 2015, @05:46AM
Have I today that I am Bisexual?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday September 07 2015, @08:58PM
Sounds like the kind of acting-out I used to do as a kid, when my parents pulled me off the Nintendo after my daily 1-hour limit was exceeded. And if I huffed and puffed about it too loudly, they'd throw me out of the house on my bike and then lock me out for awhile.
And damn, did they sure do me a hell of a favor in being actual parents. Steve Jobs and many other tech executives [nytimes.com] institute strict limits on how their kids interact with gadgets.
This should be common-sense to any parent. My family actually had a big multi-generational discussion behind the scenes about getting my my Nintendo for Christmas because even then they had read or otherwise understood instinctively the addictive potential of gadgets.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @09:49PM
Steve Jobs was so addicted to video games that he didn't come downstairs to meet his daughter's prom date.
This was the good daughter, not the daughter he didn't want BTW.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @09:59PM
I used to get "Nintendo Thumb"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 08 2015, @12:48AM
I used to get hand cramps from the fatigue of typing. Fortunately the condition corrected itself as my hands grew stronger from the exercise of typing.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 07 2015, @10:56PM
I had a look at the last few comments that posted before I was banned, then the remaining comments since I was banned.
A few weeks before my shadowbanning I reported that I was unable to find any deterministic way to predict HN's "You're posting too much. Slow down." message.
I was puzzling over that problem for months, I am still unable to come up with a way to predict it. I hypothesize an uninitialized variable; considering that HN's web application code is a steaming pile I remain unsurprised.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by TrumpetPower! on Monday September 07 2015, @06:22PM
Can anybody deny that, when full-immersion virtual reality arrives, people will flock to it in droves? It's very easy to imagine Tokyo's famous meat locker hotels transforming into that famous scene from the Matrix with plugged-in bodies packed in slime-filled coffins climbing to the sky.
And people will eagerly climb into them, and get on waiting lists just for the privilege.
I suppose it won't be such a bad thing. Frankly, I'd much rather share the planet with billions of living corpses tidily and compactly stacked away and cared for by loving robots, leaving the real world to the small minority of those of us who actually like reality.
And maybe it's the answer to the Fermi Paradox, too....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @06:48PM
I dem& you tell us more about this b&. Do they play on the s&? Because that would be gr&.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CRCulver on Monday September 07 2015, @07:59PM
Indeed. In his 1986 novel Marooned in Realtime [amazon.com] , Vernor Vinge mused that the future of a sentient civilization might not be expanding out into the stars, but rather entering into a virtual reality, perhaps buried deep below the planet's surface protected from climate changes or asteroid strikes, and safe for millions of years. Even in nerd circles, interest in human space exploration feels like it is dwindling, it no longer seems inevitable that human beings will colonize the solar system.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Monday September 07 2015, @08:53PM
>>Can anybody deny that, when full-immersion virtual reality arrives, people will flock to it in droves?
I'm currently reading the David Foster Wallace interview book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself and he says much the same thing. And, in fact, that's a big part of what Infinite Jest is all about.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 3, Insightful) by middlemen on Monday September 07 2015, @08:16PM
With its population of just 6 million, it has one of the world's highest smartphone penetration rates.
Maybe you should use dildos instead of smartphones for penetrations and the problem will go away ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @08:50PM
People sometimes tell me
I should get it permanently attached but I don't know
Even though sometimes it's a pain in the ass
I like having a detachable penis
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @09:07PM
Wi is WiBro so cheap, Bro?
WiBro [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by nyder on Monday September 07 2015, @10:46PM
Stupid people will do stupid shit. Has nothing to do with an addiction, it has to do with not being smart enough to know when you shouldn't be using your smartphone. I remember 10 years ago walking around with a palm pilot type thingy, people giving me bad looks because I might be reading a story on it while walking down the sidewalk. Was I addicted to my device? No, was actually reading a really good story I didn't want to put down. Now, 10 years later, half the people I see are walking around looking at their smartphone. Is it addiction? No, it's being stupid. If was into purse snatching, or phone stealing, or any sort of criminal behavior that required a victim that wasn't paying attention, it would be a field day now. Too many people are not paying attention to what is going on around them. Not because of an addiction, but because they are being stupid.
Take away those peoples cell phones and they will be okay. Not exactly what I'd call addiction.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by virens on Tuesday September 08 2015, @07:45AM
Has nothing to do with an addiction, it has to do with not being smart enough to know when you shouldn't be using your smartphone.
I would like to respectfully disagree. Life of most people sucks, and to forget about it (at least temporary) they escape to that smartphone world with facebook, instagram and all that. It brings a bit of relief - those pompous morons called psychologists say this escapism [wikipedia.org] (morons want to look smarter with fancy words) - and thus you want it more and more. Huxley's Brave New World [huxley.net] describes this kind of world (our world, by the way) very well.
You said it yourself: you were reading a novel from your Palm...
The rest is just usual psychologists garbage: "addiction" means a mental illness, and mental illness must be treated by... that's right! Our celebrated psychologists, who don't have any clue what they are talking about, and who's "science" is not reproducible (less than 30% of psych articles are reproducible [slashdot.org]), just want to grab another slice of money for their "studies". And hopefully share those money with pharmaceutical cmpanies to find a "pill" that will help to cure this "smartphone addiction".
In short, money grabbing gesture by utterly worthless sharlatans (psychologists). Those schmucks don't even hide this (from TFA):
So yeah, don't go to engineering school - go straight to psych education and you will have no problem finding a job...