Addicted to iPhones

Two years ago my school jumped into the national and international spotlight by announcing a campus wide initiative to explore the role of mobile computing upon pedagogy in Higher Education. Those initiatives continue to roll on and next year every ACU undergraduate will have an iPhone (right now only sophomores and freshman have them).

Given that backdrop, George, one of the leaders in this initiative, sent around this interesting link yesterday. It's a summary by Lance Whitney about research recently done at Stanford about if Stanford students were becoming "addicted" to their iPhones. Some of the findings Whitney shares:

• 75 percent said they fall asleep with their iPhones snuggled next to them
• When leaving for school in the morning, 69 percent said they are more likely to forget their wallets than their iPhones
• 84 percent of the students said they their iPhone as their watch
• 89 percent use the iPhone as an alarm
• A quarter of the students said they see the iPhone as an extension of their brain or being.
• Almost 10 percent said they sometimes pat their iPhone
• Three percent have named their iPhone
• On the social side of things, many said their social lives would be affected if their iPhones were lost or damaged
  
• However, almost three-quarters admitted that they have used their iPhone to avoid making eye contact with others.
  

So what about iPhone addiction? Whitney summarizes:

So are these people iPhone-addicted? Many of them think so. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being "Yes, I'm addicted," only 6 percent said they definitely weren't. Among the rest, 10 percent gave themselves a 5, while 34 percent rated 4 on the scale. Of all the students, 32 percent said they're worried about becoming iPhone addicts and 25 percent called the phone "dangerously alluring."