“Maladies of Infinite Aspiration”: Smartphones, Meaning-Seeking, and Anomigenesis

Abstract

Smartphones have become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, and attachment to these devices is a felt reality for many Americans. This paper describes the link between smartphone attachment and the pursuit of meaning and purpose in life. Analyses reveal meaning-seeking as a positive correlate of smartphone attachment. However, while interaction effects suggest that meaning-seeking through heavy social media and Internet use decreases the odds of smartphone attachment, meaning-seeking is strongly related to attachment at lower levels of daily media use. Also, having a satisfying life purpose decreases the odds of smartphone attachment, though this protective effect is not as strong as meaning-seeking in the final models. We conclude that smartphone attachment, within a context of latent anomie, could be anomigenic, inadvertently exacerbating feelings of despair while simultaneously promising to resolve them. Findings provide a sociological link between smartphone attachment and the negative psychosocial outcomes described in the literature.