Smartphone addiction? There’s an app for that! - How “smartphone addiction apps” frame smartphone addiction through discourse and affordances

Abstract

There seems to be a recurring trend surrounding media consumption: after a new medium is introduced, discourses of critique and addiction emerge. Smartphone addiction applications - smartphone apps claiming to help you solve your smartphone addiction- are a symptom of this tendency. However, these apps are problematic because they point to a limited (solutionist and instrumentalist) understanding of smartphone addiction; their simplicity seems contradictory to the complexity of smartphone addiction. Moreover, they entail a problematic paradox; solving smartphone addiction by using a smartphone. This thesis therefore engages with three smartphone addiction apps - BreakFree, OffTime and Forest- to understand how they frame smartphone addiction, from the perspective of media studies and sociomaterialism. Such apps are products of human decision-making and are therefore not neutral; they are underpinned by assumptions, norms and discourses already circulating in society (Lupton 2014). Hence, both a textual discourse analysis and affordance analysis are used to uncover how the apps frame smartphone addiction explicitly and implicitly through discourse (verbal rhetoric) and affordances (form/function and interface). In order to do so, I established a theoretical framework that outlines how (smartphone and internet) addiction is commonly understood in academic discourse. It also includes the notion of procedural bias, derived from procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007), to uncover biases present in the apps’ affordances. Moreover, the logic of quantification and gamification is outlined in order to criticize how these practices help to frame smartphone addiction in a restricted manner. The analysis shows that the app developers overgeneralize smartphone addiction by creating juxtapositions between smartphone use and smartphone abstinence, and that they frame smartphone addiction as being caused solely by the technology instead of also the user. Moreover, the apps quantify smartphone addiction and imply that addiction is solely related to overuse, neglecting other (personal) factors. Lastly, the analysis shows that the apps implement affordances that contradict the aim of the apps themselves, such as the implementation of social buttons and push notifications, which again highlights the developers’ lack of understanding smartphone addiction. I argue that the apps are created by developers that do not have an elaborate understanding of smartphone addiction, hence creating apps that are unsuitable for the assessment, understanding and treatment of smartphone addiction. Moreover, this thesis adds to the academic discourse on three levels. On the discursive level, my research shows that the discourses of design and pathology in the case of the addiction apps are separated and need to be intertwined in order to develop valuable addiction apps. On a media-historic level, it demonstrates that the development of smartphone addiction apps is indeed a symptom of a recurring trend in media consumption. On the level of media studies, this thesis shows the value of applying the notion of procedural bias to the analysis of smartphone applications, in order to uncover how biases are expressed through affordances and how this creates meaning.