Are There Different Understandings on Excessive Use of Smartphone between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants?

Abstract

Smartphone is no longer instruments for connecting each other. These days, the people engages in an online activities such as searching in internet, sending email, playing social games, engagement in social networking anytime and anywhere. Indeed, the number of excessive user to smartphone is extremely increased. The rapid growth of excessive smartphone brings to numerous concerns in reality. Despite growing concerns about smartphone addiction, our understanding of this issue remains limited. The purpose of this study is to explore the social understanding of smartphone addiction. In particular, we expect that there is an understanding gap between digital natives and digital immigrants regarding smartphone addiction. For the research objective, transcripts from in-depth interviews of 85 participants were analyzed and were boiled down 24 key topics by content analysis. In the next stage, the topics were classified into central and peripheral factors by core and periphery analysis. And we identified overlapped core topics which have five topics and the others which have five and three topics between two generations. Finally, to compare Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants with different understandings of smartphone addiction, we illustrated the maximum tree, which visualizes social representations. The findings indicate that they have different position or attitude with regard of same situation, smartphone addiction. While Digital Natives perceive the phenomenon of smartphone addiction in the position of an actor; Digital Immigrants understand it from the observer’s perspective. This exploratory study contributes to provide fundamental knowledge about smartphone addiction for future research by initially investigating users’ understandings of smartphone addiction. Also, the findings of the study also enable us to shift attention to perspective aspects of the some social issues that can occur around our lives. In addition, we provide some insight to politicians that they can find the ideas dealing with addictive use of smartphone.