Baylor University || Media Communications || News: Women college students spend an average of 10 hours a day on their cellphones and men college students spend nearly eight, with excessive use posing potential risks for academic performance, according to a Baylor University study on cellphone activity published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions.
“That’s astounding,” said researcher James Roberts, Ph.D., The Ben H. Williams Professor of Marketing in Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business. “As cellphone functions increase, addictions to this seemingly indispensable piece of technology become an increasingly realistic possibility.”
2 comments:
Uh what? 8-10 hours a day on average are spent on your phone? By what metric? Does checking your phone every 5-10 minutes count as time on your phone? Are people literally spending 10 hours with their eyeballs focused on their phone? That seems quite extreme. I would love to hear further details on how that part of the study was calculated. Lastly, I would argue that 150ish study participants is not nearly enough data, especially when referenced against the demographic most prone to answer online studies...
Granted, there are parts of the article that ring true. I do get anxious when I lose track of my phone. So much information travels through it, including information that is time sensitive. I thought I lost my phone the other day, and I was highly pained at the fact that I might have to replace it.
This seems alarmist at best. Addiction is a medical term with a very specific definition, one which I neither saw articulated nor backed up by the data presented in this study. Basically, addiction in the scientific sense needs to include a physical change in brain chemistry, of which this article made no mention.
Additionally, a cell phone (or smart phone, more specifically) takes the place of many different devices that a person may have spent a comparable amount of time using ten years ago. I bet college students spent more time reading magazines before Pinterest, and Walkmen were the portable music players of choice, but since they weren't "all in one", they don't count as "cell phone use."
Finally, my cell phone, in addition to being a fairly expensive piece of technology, contains a lot of very important sensitive material, such as bank info, academic stuff and my email. If I get agitated when I can't find it, it's not because I'm "addicted" to it, but because it would be an extraordinary headache if I were to have to go about re-securing my life.
But, you know, I'm a Pinterest-addicted lady college student...
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