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.

智能手机已成为日常生活中无处不在的一部分，对这些设备的依恋对许多美国人来说是一种现实。本文描述了智能手机依恋与追求生活意义和目的之间的联系。分析表明，意义寻求与智能手机依恋呈正相关。然而，虽然交互效应表明，通过大量社交媒体和互联网使用来寻求意义会降低智能手机依恋的几率，但意义寻求与较低水平的依恋密切相关日常媒体使用。此外，拥有令人满意的生活目的会降低智能手机依恋的几率，尽管这种保护作用不如最终模型中的意义寻求那么强。我们得出结论，在潜在失范的情况下，智能手机依恋可能是失范的，在不经意间加剧绝望感，同时承诺会解决它们。研究结果提供了智能手机依恋与文献中描述的负面社会心理结果之间的社会学联系。