Get Off Your Phone?? By Why?! Commentary on the Personal, Societal, and Corporate Motivations of Smartphone Use via Notifications and Creative Outlets

Tanner Christensen

Department of Communications Co-Term Thesis

Have you ever felt like you could not go ten minutes without checking your phone? Or have you ever gone on your phone with a specific goal in mind, but then got distracted and completely lost track of your original aim?

Don’t worry. You are not alone. Our relationships to our phones are complicated. Take for instance a commonly referenced statistic from dscout, a market researching firm; people interact with their phones “a whopping 2,617 times each day, on average” (Winnick & Zolna, 2016). The Human Screenome Project found that, on average, people take 550,727 actions on their phones per day (2024; see Appendix). While jarring, statistics like these effectively illuminate the extent to which so many of us use our phones. Is it bad to use our phones this much?

Thesis PDF Flipbook

Citation