Currently anonymity produces fear. Almost as much as loneliness. Social networks remove the feeling of exclusion: emotions are overturned, with the protection offered by being on one side of the screen, and leisure time is shared.
The worldwide increase in mobile phones is largely due to this reality. Paradoxically, the use of the telephone has declined notably in the last decade and it is increasingly frequent to abandon friendships, relationships and spaces for socialization to maximize connection time.
With the technology that surrounds us and that will soon be within us, real relationships, those of being in front of the person in front, are taking a back seat by leaps and bounds. Although Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are called to make life easier, We must not ignore that they can also complicate it for us.
Any inclination without measure towards any activity can lead to an addiction, and this occurs even if there is no chemical involved.
Addiction is a pathological hobby that generates dependence and the person who suffers it remains liberated. In some circumstances, which mainly affect adolescents, the Internet and technological resources, it can cease to be a means to become an end.
That is, a obsession with acquiring the latest news, the compulsive need to check the cell phone at every moment, the panic of losing connection with the ... virtual world, the urge to escape from reality permanently.
However, it is advisable not to identify the supposed or possible technological addiction to the Internet, to the mobile phone, with other addictions such as, for example, pathological gambling.
Although the use of ICT allows us to access potentially addictive content online more quickly, they are not the source of addictive behaviors that can generate the consumption of games of chance, gambling or Internet pornography. In general, however, it is accepted and correct to conclude that any activity that involves rewards can potentially become addictive.
In the abuse of the mobile phone, the fear of living disconnected, the expectation that we place on communication technology to overcome that anguish, paradoxically produces insulation.
The maximization of connection time limits, wastes or neglects friendships and spaces for socialization. And it is that total digital interconnection, such as hypercommunication, do not facilitate the encounter with the other.
At this point I would like to share with you something that is already a fact, probably known to many, and perhaps not so much to others. While for the so-called generation X, those of us who were born between the 60s and 90s of the twentieth century, the new technology has been mainly means of operational communication, to coordinate activities or send quick messages..
However, for the current generation Z, adolescents and young adults, who have the Internet from an early age, are comfortable with technology and social media interaction, life revolves around what happens through your electronic device.
According to a psychological research published in The Times, 75% of people between 25 and 29 years old sleep with their mobile. Many young people want to be connected with their friends 24 hours a day.
Screens send wakefulness signals to the brain. The psychological consequences of not sleeping, or sleeping poorly as a result of the influence of electronic devices, in many of the people who abuse digital technology, are manifested mainly in disorders of anxiety, sadness and irritability.
The increase in negative thoughts is very significant, according to psychologist Daniel Freeman, someone who has no doubt about his knowledge about Insomnia and sleep disorders.
According to a 2011 SecurEnvoy survey, almost 66% of English people suffer from an irrational fear of leaving home without their mobile phone, of forgetting it, of losing it, of being without it at all times..
Different studies, in different populations, provide similar figures, in almost all places where the use of digital technology is part of the system.
No one has the slightest doubt that the emergence of mobile phones, far exceeding accessibility to the Internet or television, is producing multiple effects on human relationships, public behavior, the codification of the concepts of public space. and private, as well as ambivalent reactions in users. After the SecurEnvoy study, the term nomophobia was coined.
The smartphone is becoming an essential accessory in many of the things and relationships of our daily life.
For many young people it has become a safety link, sometimes even an umbilical cord with their parents. The mobile comes to establish itself as something like a central artifact of the image of themselves.
But not only for adolescents, for many adults already, living without a cell phone is more difficult than living without love, or without friends. A phenomenon of abduction is taking place that dismisses relationships in the real world in favor of virtual interactions and connections, of panic crisis at the idea of going through life without a mobile.
This phenomenon is of great concern because shortens the gap between dependency and addiction. Nomophobia, in any case, is only one part of a complex syndrome that leads to dependence and abuse of the mobile phone, and the serious emotional crises and worrying behavior disorders that it entails..
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