Nomophobia, the fear of being without one’s mobile device. Have you heard of it before? Maybe you’ve heard of or know someone with it, or maybe you even unknowingly have it yourself. Although the use of the suffix “phobia” might be a bit much (a better term for it would be “phone addiction”), the connotation of the word is obvious. Over half of Americans own a smartphone and the dependency on these devices is both expected yet surprising all at once. Nomophobia affects around 40% of Americans, meaning only around 10% of the smartphone populace isn’t affected by the anxiety and paralysing panic associated with not having that portable social connecter. Pretty strange, right? Well it’s also rather worrisome too. Stemming from the words “no…show more content… The UK is no exception to nomophobia either. “It was found that 51 per cent of the 1,245 UK residents questioned said that they suffer from ‘extreme tech anxiety’ when separated from their devices” (Macleod, 2013). Asia faces many cases of phone addiction as well, with South Korea considering 25% of their children as phone addicts and Japan naming the phenomenon keitai culture, or mobile phone culture. China has even installed a sidewalk dedicated to those who both walk the streets and stare at their screens in the city of Chongqing. It’s a problem that spans various and vastly different…show more content… Just think about it, how can you live life if every second is seen through a screen? If your peace of mind and ability to properly function is solely dependent on the state of a handheld electronic? To say that they can be a distraction is an understatement. There have been many examples of people getting into accidents because of their phones, and this is excluding texting while driving (which makes a crash 23X more likely). One example is the Taiwanese tourist who walked and fell off a pier in Melbourne because she was checking her Facebook. Nowadays, many people see these devices as necessities that are just as needed as air. Even the terms that are commonly associated with this technology reflects the attachment towards it. For example, when your phone runs out of power, it’s common to say that your device “died”, a term that’s pretty sentimental when you realize it’s just about a