Exploring Nomophobia and Our Reliance on Smart Phones

Everywhere you go these days, you see people glued to their mobile devices. Everything that was a bore before is now much more enjoyable with the introduction of 2G, 3G, and then 4G.

The term ‘Nomophobia’ (no-mobile-phone-phobia) was coined by researchers who discovered that people would feel anxious or distressed when their mobile phones are not at hand. It also relates to the extent in which we as a society now depend on phones to complete the most basic of tasks and learning. Not (that!) long ago, I remember my Maths teacher telling me I would need to learn arithmetic as, “You’re never going to have a miniature calculator in your pocket all the time.” Little did he know that just a decade or so later, almost everyone would have access to not only a calculator, but a million other applications and tools for learning.

I remember when an argument could go on for a week, arguing strange topics such as ‘whether or not a particular insect was in fact a praying mantis’. Smart phones put an end to all arguments, as anything unknown can quickly be Googled. Now we rely heavily on the internet to answer all our questions, and the dependence has shifted the way our brains work. Why bother remembering a telephone number, when it is stored in a device? Why keep a track of your calendar appointments in your head when you get updated reminders? Researchers have now shown that our transactive memory reduces our motivation and ability to actually retain knowledge about topics that we have easy access to. Quite literally, as the Scientific American put it, “the internet has become an external hard drive for our own memories”.

According to the latest statistics we could find – in 2010 – numbers showed that, even then, already 58% of men and 47% of women suffered from the fear of being without their mobile device, with an additional 9% who felt stressed when their phones were switched off.  This, combined with the research by the Scientific American, proves that the way that humans learn and understand things now is much different from the way we did before smart devices. We rely on these devices to learn, to be our memory, and to be an integral part of our lives. And if these numbers were this high then – what do you think they are now? The vast majority of us now immediately panic at the thought of losing touch with the internet that’s at our fingertips, whether this is because of the element of communication with our families, losing touch with our work emails or simply losing the ability to Google search any answer to any question we desire.

So, while my Maths teacher thought we wouldn’t have calculators in our pockets, he also didn’t realise that almost all schools would come to rely on kids owning individual tablets to aid study. We’re seeing a huge adoption rate of tablet aided learning in the UK, Australia and the USA, with massive growth also in international countries such as Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and many more. Despite this huge increase in usage, we still haven’t seen a decent solution for actually charging the devices. Kids take them home, and then end up keeping them overnight and forgetting to charge them back up before going to school the next day.

This reliance on technology to learn means that we have to keep both ourselves and our kids charged up at all times, which is where the Novi fits in. It’s not just a charging station for schools, but also is a great charging solution for restaurants, bars, hotels, events or even more.

In fact, we rely on our smart phones so much that hundreds of thousands of studies have been commissioned regarding their usage, and mobile phone developers are listening. With iOS 9.2, we’ve seen the introduction of the red tinted screen for the iPhone – released after several years of studies showed that the blue light emitted from screens can prevent the body from falling asleep naturally. We can’t even go to bed without keeping our phones on to entertain us.

It’s quite clear that most of us suffer from Nomophobia, and that this fear is only going to expand globally as more and more countries adopt smartphones for personal, business and educational usage. We’re here to try and make that fear a little less of a reality.