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The frequency and length of daily phone use , . It's a , driving recent decisions to ban phones in schools in , and .

Social media, gaming, streaming and all contribute to this pull on our attention. But we need to look at the phones themselves to get the bigger picture.

As I argue in my newly published book, , our phones—and more recently, our watches—have become animated beings in our lives. These devices can build bonds with us by recognizing our presence and reacting to our bodies.

Packed with a growing range of technical features that target our sensory and psychological soft spots, smartphones create comforting ties that keep us picking them up. The emotional cues designed into these objects and interfaces imply that they need our attention, while in actuality, the devices are .

A responsive presence

Face recognition, geolocation, touchscreens, vibration, sound alerts and audio and motion sensing all play their part in catching our attention and responding to our actions. Separately, these may not create a strong emotional attachment, but collectively they situate the phone as a uniquely intimate, sensitive and knowing presence in our lives.

Take facial recognition locks, for example. Convenient for quick access, a smartphone will light up and unlock with a glance when it encounters a known and trusted face. When , Apple claimed: "Do it up anyway you do it, Face ID learns your face. It learns who you are." This implies a deeper user-device connection, like the one we have with folks we know when we spot them crossing our path.

Some devices have repurposed the hand wave—a typical gesture of friendship—into a feature that to take a photo.

Geolocation converts networking signals into a dot on a map, and we see that dot as us—not our phone—just as we may see the dots of our friends' phones on the map as them.

Phantom vibrations

Sensory cues play a strong role. Touchscreens allow the phone's interface to react subtly, like edge lighting and , to mimic the pliability of skin.

Vibration and sound alerts make us highly sensitive to the smallest movement or sound from the device. This produces conditions like , where we imagine that the device requires our attention, even when it doesn't.

Audio and motion sensing, on the other hand, allows the device to react to us almost instantly, as when it on an incoming call when we grab its body.

Roots and origins

Most of these features were developed decades ago for other uses. GPS was , then was to both navigate and to allow others to locate them if necessary.

in the late 1970s for professionals—from hospital staff to traveling salespeople—to notify them of an important phone call.

Sound alerts became more widespread with Tamagotchi and other 1990s digital pets. Those toys are especially significant when discussing today's psychological dependency on portable devices.

Through their beeping cries for attention, Tamagotchi to build emotional attachments to virtual handheld companions needing care and nurturing. Not surprisingly, these toys for their tendency to disrupt classes and distract students.

Indiscriminate tracking

Phones have become an essential part of who we are and how we behave. But there's also an issue of privacy around our most intimate actions and behaviors. , measuring sounds, movements and proximity.

There is the risk that our dependency will intensify as phones learn things about us that have, until recently, been off limits.

Sleep is a good example. Audio and motion sensing allows the device to get a reasonable picture of when and how we sleep, often collecting and sharing biometric data through pre-loaded health and wellness apps.

Another example is more sophisticated facial recognition, that will not only be able to recognize a face, but also .

All of this collected data may have profound consequences, making our bodily behavior, our off-line interactions with others and our emotional fragility a regular part of the data profiles used to leverage our lives for corporate profit.

Managing dependency

Short of powering off or walking away, what can we do to manage this dependency? We can access device settings and activate only those features we truly require, adjusting them now and again as our habits and lifestyles change.

Turning on geolocation only when we need navigation support, for example, increases privacy and helps break the belief that a phone and a user are an inseparable pair. Limiting sound and haptic alerts can gain us some independence, while opting for a passcode over facial recognition locks reminds us the device is a machine and not a friend. This may also make it .

So-called "" limit what a user can do with their devices, though that's a tough sell when 24/7 connectivity is becoming an expectation.

Manufacturers can do their part by placing more invasive device settings in the "off" position in the factory and being more transparent about their potential uses and data liabilities. That's not likely to happen, however, without stronger government regulation that puts users and their data first.

In the meantime, at a minimum, we should broaden our public discussions of dependency beyond social media, gaming and artificial intelligence to acknowledge how phones, in themselves, can capture our attention and cultivate our loyalty.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .