What (missing) the smartphone means: Implications of the medium’s portable, personal, and prosthetic aspects in the deprivation experience of teenagers

This deprivation study leverages the smartphone’s absence to understand its presence, exploring a one-week smartphone deprivation experience of 80 Israeli adolescents aged 13-18. The data was primarily qualitative, derived from field journals, interviews, and focus groups. However, the most important and least expected finding was quantitative: all participants but one completed the week. This could be due to gratifications from nonuse that kicked-in. Analysis of the meaning of the abstention, and hence of the smartphone, focused on the cellular’s 3Ps: portable, personal, and prosthetic. The portability aspect showed that the device, with its user’s social world collapsed into it, stands as a meta-social entity, providing security and embeddedness. The personal aspect highlighted the significance of smartphone-enabled: (a) hyperconnectivity, (b) rituals, emphasizing its liminality and role as a Winnicottian transitional object, (c) existential significance of the user-smartphone amalgam. The prosthetic aspect pointed to the importance of the device’s physical and psychological “presence,” interpreted through the concepts of McLuhan’s “extension,” Aaron and Aaron’s “expansion,” and Schweiker’ “enhancement” of self. The relatively benign nature of the withdrawal experience suggests that re-balancing space and time orientations and an altered media-ecology equilibrium was experienced as gratifying.