Nomophobia

Abstract

The first investigation of mobile phone addiction, a survey conducted by the UK Post Office in 2008, found that close to 53 percent of people in the UK suffered from a persistent, irrational fear of being disconnected from their mobile device. Later, in 2012, the British cellphone company SecurEnvoy reported that as many as 66 percent of the population suffered from nomophobia that induced stress levels comparable to those felt when getting married or going to the dentist. Before these surveys were conducted and the term coined, several scholars have done pioneering work on mobile phone addiction, both theoretically and practically. A review of this extant literature indicates that nomophobia is commonly considered an “emerging problem of the modern era” (Dixit et al., 2010), or a “disorder of the modern world” (King, Valencia & Nardi, 2010). In this article, however, we approach nomophobia as a young concept with an ancient history intimately intertwined with culture, consciousness, and communication.