Addiction to Technology

After reading,"Personality and Self-Esteeem as Predictors of Young People's Technology Use." I think that certain personalities engage in certain technological behaviors because people that have a specific type of personality will chose some kind of technology that will make them feel conformable with their personality and socializing. For example, according to the experiment, disagreeable students spend more time on calls because they prefer not to talk to people face-to-face because they have bad temper and argue al lot. Also, people that know them will prefer only to contact them by phone because they don’t like to argue with them face-to-face.

In the same way, neurotic students spend more time texting because it is difficult for them to socialize face-to-face or talking by phone. They feel more confident texting because they have control over the text. They can revise it and send it when they think is the right time. Because text-messaging is not so fast like IM, so neurotic students can take some time to think what information they want to send and correct it if they need it. In the other hand, disagreeable students prefer more IM because is faster than text-messaging. Their personality provably needs a faster response than neurotic students.

To describe addiction to technology they use three indicators of addiction:

1) Withdrawal – it is a physiological or psychological response that people addicted to technology experience when they do not text, talk by phone or do IM.

2) Loss of control – Spending most of the time talking by phone, texting or doing IM.

3) Salience – Thinking all the time about texting, calling or doing IM. They just want to text or IM all day. If they are not doing it. They are thinking on doing it.

I would define addiction as a condition where the individual can experience withdrawal symptoms if he or her doesn’t engage in his addictive behavior. The addictive behavior could be texting, IM or talking by phone. Addicts can spend most of the time engaged in their addictive behavior and the withdrawal symptoms could be anxiety, getting angry, not eating, etc.

The evidence in this study does not convince me that there is exactly a correlation of neurotic students and text-messaging or disagreeable students and talking by cell phones. First of all, 200 individuals is a very small number to be statistically significant. Statistical studies need large numbers to be significant. I think that there is some kind of truth that different kinds of personalities will prefer different types of technology, but the study is too small to tell that disagreeable individuals prefer mostly talking by phone or neurotic students prefer mostly texting.

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