Survey Reveals iPhone Addiction Rampant on College Campuses
Including room and board, it now costs over $50,000 per year to attend Stanford University. That's a lot of cash to cough up to send your son or daughter to the second ranked university in the world (according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities), but money well spent when you consider your offspring will be tackling the tough issues, like iPhone addiction.
Huh? Believe it or not, a new Stanford study set out to discover just how attached college kids are to their Apple-inspired smartphone, and as it turns out, the results are pretty creepy.
Out of the 200 students with iPhones who participated in the survey, 75 percent fessed up to being bed mates with their handheld gadget. Think about that the next time you ask to borrow someone's iPhone. Granted, there are viable reasons for sleeping with an iPhone, and 89 percent said they used it as their alarm clock. But these are college kids we're talking about, and we're probably better off not knowing what other functions are being performed once the lights go out.
It gets more bizarre. While 15 percent said the iPhone was turning them into a media addict, 30 percent referred to their smartphone as a "doorway into the world." Another 25 percent dubbed it "dangerously alluring, and 41 percent felt it would be "a tragedy" to lose their iPhone, which in this case is literally like losing your bed mate.
So what does it all mean? For starters, it means you paid too much to send your offspring to Stanford. But the survey also reveals what some would argue is an unhealthy addiction towards the iPhone. When asked to rate their level of addiction on a scale of one to five, with five being addicted and one being not addicted at all, 44 percent rated themselves a four or five, while just 6 percent said they weren't addicted.
"One of the most striking things we saw in the interviews was just how identified people were with their iPhone," said Professor Tanya Luhrmann, the Stanford anthropology professor who oversaw the survey. "It was not so much with the object itself, but it had so much personal information that it became a kind of extension of the mind and a means to have a social life. It just kind of captured part of their identity."
Thoughts? Post 'em in our comments section below!
Huh? Believe it or not, a new Stanford study set out to discover just how attached college kids are to their Apple-inspired smartphone, and as it turns out, the results are pretty creepy.
Out of the 200 students with iPhones who participated in the survey, 75 percent fessed up to being bed mates with their handheld gadget. Think about that the next time you ask to borrow someone's iPhone. Granted, there are viable reasons for sleeping with an iPhone, and 89 percent said they used it as their alarm clock. But these are college kids we're talking about, and we're probably better off not knowing what other functions are being performed once the lights go out.
It gets more bizarre. While 15 percent said the iPhone was turning them into a media addict, 30 percent referred to their smartphone as a "doorway into the world." Another 25 percent dubbed it "dangerously alluring, and 41 percent felt it would be "a tragedy" to lose their iPhone, which in this case is literally like losing your bed mate.
So what does it all mean? For starters, it means you paid too much to send your offspring to Stanford. But the survey also reveals what some would argue is an unhealthy addiction towards the iPhone. When asked to rate their level of addiction on a scale of one to five, with five being addicted and one being not addicted at all, 44 percent rated themselves a four or five, while just 6 percent said they weren't addicted.
"One of the most striking things we saw in the interviews was just how identified people were with their iPhone," said Professor Tanya Luhrmann, the Stanford anthropology professor who oversaw the survey. "It was not so much with the object itself, but it had so much personal information that it became a kind of extension of the mind and a means to have a social life. It just kind of captured part of their identity."
Thoughts? Post 'em in our comments section below!
