The final scene of the 2010 blockbuster movie The Social Network was prophetic. The cheerful serenading of the Beatles belies the image of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in front of his laptop, staring at his Facebook profile with eyes glazed over, hitting the refresh persistently. Was this actually prophetic? According to scholars such as Jonathan Haidt, social-media-related mental health impacts began to hit hard in 2012, around two years after the release of the movie. However, there is ongoing debate about what social media companies knew and when. The image of Eisenberg repetitively refreshing is one that is eerily familiar to most of us. The only misrepresentation is that the vast majority of us are accessing social media through our phones now rather than on computers. Why is it that we seem to be so captured by our phones?

Why do they seem so addictive?

There are a plethora of reasons why our phones are so compelling. It is not just that our phones are designed to be that way, or that apps amp up (and even supersede) the effect. Technology has enabled testing, updates, and rollouts in an unprecedented fashion. A........

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