Phones and the urge to click aren't going away. Neither are the tragedies.
By THomas Wells
We plow through five mile markers then slide 60 feet along the edge of the shoulder before enough snow piles up to scrape our ride to a halt. This is the good outcome. The three tons of steel traveling 55 miles an hour could have flipped and rolled in a second, killing everyone inside. But after disentangling my heart from my esophagus, we determine that everyone's fine. Dad pulls himself out of the car to catch his breath on the side of the road, and he looks to his smartphone GPS to figure out how far we are from West Yellowstone, Montana. It's below freezing, and the phone doesn't have anything remotely resembling service. This is the second time he's glanced at his phone for the GPS; the first is what landed us here.
How'd this happen? My guess is it has something to do with the dopamine. I'm going to play fast and loose and speculate that a major component of cellphone interaction comes from "wanting" that dopamine response. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gives us little jolts of pleasure to motivate us to go and seek out more pleasurable experiences. It would seem to me that smartphones facilitate this process - every time you punch a button, you get a little jolt of dopamine, as that button push has the potential to take you somewhere pleasurable. Thanks to the device's ability to easily access the Internet, we have at our fingertips an unlimited amount of available seeking. The satisfaction of clicking on a new thing keeps dopamine flowing along at a healthy thrum. Today, we also have all sorts of connectivity to apps that offer validation - a double-tap on Instagram gives us the jolt that we love.