What makes us emotionally attached to personal media?

Today, while I was reading about emotional attachment to cell phones in a chapter written by Jane Vincent in the book Thumb Culture, I was reminded of an interesting incident I witnessed last year in my apartment. I was living with new apartment mates who had just come from India. One night, when I went to their room to ask for something, I was amazed to see one of the girls sleeping with her head on the keyboard section of her laptop. It was both hilarious and touching. I gently tried to remove her laptop, but she woke up startled and wanted her laptop to remain open through the night. I couldn’t have asked her about what was going on in her mind, but I could sense how deeply connected she felt to everyone back home, through her laptop.

In her chapter, Vincent examined the various ways in which social practices of mobile phone users and their relationship to mobile phones leads to emotional attachment to cell phones. She found that people were emotional about the information stored in and delivered via their mobile phones. I quite agree with this statement, the fact that people exchange emotionally charged text messages with their loved ones, and then store them for reading later, could make them emotional about their mobile phones.

Further, she also found that people are more emotionally attached to person-to-person communication than person-to-WWW connection. I think it would be interesting to examine young people’s emotional involvement to text messages sent to reality TV programs such as the “American Idol” or “Indian Idol”. It is my assumption that the level of emotional attachment, to the information exchanged between people, with internet and with TV, would be very different and of a different nature.

She also identified several emotional responses associated with the use of mobile phones – panic, strangeness, ‘being cool’, irrational behavior, thrill, anxiety. I think this would be definitely true in the case of young people who feel “very cool” to own a certain mobile device and be a part of mobile culture associated with it.

Her findings that people look at mobile phones as an icon of “me, my mobile and my identity” show that people share an emotionally charged relationship with mobile phones. What I found most interesting was her explanation that the use of mobile phone involves the engagement with more senses than any other computational device and therefore, leads to greater emotional attachment. For example, when you use mobile phones, you get sensory experiences such as touch (by carrying, holding or fondling the cell phone), hearing (because of listening to others), sight (by looking at messages sent and received), and smell and taste (you get by association only).

And this statement brings me back to the incident I described earlier, I think the laptop exuded the warmth, for my roommate, which she had left behind…and despite the pinging from her friends back home through the night, she had a restful sleep. That’s what she told me in the morning, when I jokingly reminded her of sleeping with her laptop…