Now that Internet’oholism is on the road to become a more frequent word because of the recent characterization of internet addiction as official mental illness (remind me to dwell on the decadence of our society later), I was thinking about the existence or not of an “addiction” to our mobiles. To tell you the truth, I have never been a fan of classifying something as an addiction or not as I have always believed that anything can be overcome by the human mind, once it’s set it as a goal. I would prefer using the word “need” instead.
I was thinking about this topic when I cam across a post about mobile addiction with an experiment conducted with Forbes’ editor denying him access to his Blackberry, his email and his cellphone calls. Although I tend to believe that there was some acting and a good use of onion involved, I am concerned by the issue raised by this experience.
Almost every single person I know has a mobile handset and if they lose it for a second, it’s as if the whole world crumbled, or as if they had industries and companies relying solely on them. Is it a so-called addiction? I don’t think so, it’s more the urge to feel needed and essential. Personally, I have never tried going mobile-free for a long time because it’s not very plausible when you blog about the thing. But when I think about my daily mobile usage, I always come to the conclusion that it’s not essential in my life, although it makes a certain number of operations a lot easier.
So what do you think of your mobile usage, are you a mobil’oholic? Could you give up your device and for how much time?
