ABSTRACT
The appropriation of smartphones by teenagers and, increasingly, younger children has raised concerns over excessive use, a preoccupation shared by children complaining that smartphones have changed the context of face-to-face interactions with peers. Children also admit to being ‘addicted’ to their smartphones, feeling the need to constantly check them. The issue of excessive use has originally been addressed within the field of internet studies through a medical/psychological framework: internet addiction is understood as an impulse-control disorder not dissimilar to other pathological conditions such as gambling. This approach to excessive use is problematic in the case of smartphones. Rather, mobile-specific approaches to young people’s communication suggest it is better to frame teenagers’ attachment to their smartphones through the lens of the ‘emancipation approach’, according to which teenagers move out from family sphere through developing a stronger connection with their peer group, with the aid of mobile communication. This chapter draws on a quantitative and qualitative data collected across Europe as part of Net Children Go Mobile research project on access and use of the internet from mobile devices among 9-to-16-year-old children. It also shows how looking at excessive smartphones use from a different perspective helps illuminate the process of the incorporation of smartphones into everyday life, understand how communicative affordances are socially negotiated, while highlighting the continuities between smartphones and mobile communication in general.
