According to the Los Angeles Times, “nomophobia,” or the fear of being without your cell phone, is on the rise.
"Using the online polling service OnePull, SecurEnvoy found that 66% of the 1,000 people surveyed in the United Kingdom say they fear losing or being without their phone.
Just four years ago a similar survey found that only 53% of people suffered from nomophobia (no-mobile-phobia).
People 18-24 tend to be the most nomophobic (77%), followed by people aged 25-34 (68%). The third
According to the website allaboutcounseling.com, nomophobes can be treated by exposure therapy. First a person can start imagining what it would be like to be without a phone. And then maybe spend small amounts of time away from the phone."
First off, I’d like to state for the record that the term “nomophobia” is lame and I really hope it doesn’t catch on. Instead we should refer to it as a branch of agoraphobia, because that’s what it is. I’ll never forget a few years back, my old roommate had this girlfriend, and a group of friends were questioning me about how they met. They made at least a dozen guesses – Match.com, eHarmony, Facebook, MySpace, JDate, etc. – before eventually giving up. My response was, “they met the old-fashioned way.” Then I had to explain to them that the “old-fashioned way” meant at a bar and not in an AIM chat room. It’s pretty ironic that in our ever-growing search for interpersonal connectivity, a face-to-face conversation has become the 27th most utilized option. I don’t mean ironic in an Alanis Morrisette sort of way, like rain on your wedding day or finding 10,000 knives when all you need is a spork. I mean literally ironic. The point is, if we can go from “Do you come here often?” to poking people on Facebook in just a few years, I think it’s pretty safe to say that our kids’ generation is fucked. Or not fucked, if you want to be literal about it.
Follow Tom on Twitter: @thefaketomz
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