You know that feeling you get when you see your phone is low on charge?
That sense of terror it inspires to see it showing just 5 percent left, contemplating just what you're going to do if it dies before you get to a plug point? You ever wondered how strange that is?
Well, there's actually a name of it, and it's called Nomophobia. This is described as an irrational fear of not having your phone or being unable to use it for some reason. And given how commonplace smartphones are today, it's safe to say a major slice of the population encounters this fear regularly.
Wired focused on this in a piece recently, and specifically a few scientists studying the phenomenon. One of them is ?eng¨¹l Uysal, a Turkish researcher that studied nomophobia among students at the Erciyes University in Turkey. And he had a very interesting contribution to make.
A few decades ago, we could be considered a lot more independent than we are today. We got around just fine without cell phones, talked to people, bought stuff from stores, all in person. Ever since the entry of phones however, we've gotten used to placing a digital divider between us and any contact.
Of course, it can be said that got worse once smartphones entered the game. Now, there's pretty much no reason to talk to people at all. Of course, that's an excuse older generations often use to prove how messed up millennials are. But the thing is, for some people, that's the only option.
According to Uysal's research, the students that tended to suffer from nomophobia more were the ones that were socially awkward. She realised that the quiet kids, the outcasts, those out of their depths, they weren't just frivolously using their phones, they relied on them to keep up social relationships.
"The basic purpose of the mobile phone is to allow people in two different places to communicate instantly, eliminating the human anxiety about loneliness," she said. "But if you use your mobile phone to avoid in-person relationships, you create communication dependency."
So if your phone dies on you, it feels like the relationships are dying too. And that's just one part of it. People that rely on their phones for work will panic about what kind of reports they're missing. Those that have important family photos saved to their phones will freak out if it looks like it isn't booting up anymore.
We've come to rely on smartphones far too much. No device before this has ever had this kind of effect on us. Almost all of us have one, and we carry it everywhere, never leaving it far from reach. Maybe it's time we took a moment to look around us for a change.