I've come to hate notifications, alerts, and digital nags of all kinds. I disable practically all of them on every device I own, the only unsolicited notifications I want are from rare legitimate emergencies.
But yea, simply having a smartphone around makes you want to fiddle with it. I would guess there is some addictive component there, as it impacts nearly everyone.
Uh, access to new information? Geeks are especially vulnerable. Or not, because just think about how many people just constantly scroll Facebook, instagram, twitter and whatever.
Humans like to feel connected, like to know interesting things, and like to feel engaged, and so on. And this little magic box pumps a lot of reward for just a few tiny taps. Just a swipe, and new shiny spectacle things happen, woo! One more swipe!
And you see other humans on Facebook. For some people that's addictive. For others learning about new gadgets, for some simply learning (duolingo, coursera, audiobooks), or checking the news, or reading a book, just one more page while I wait for someone to go back for something in the shop/car, etc.
Windows 10 that came on my laptop kept displaying a notification every day in the bottom right of the screen, notifying me that the security scan found no issues.
It seems like that's a regression in design. Only notify me if something goes wrong, don't notify me if things are as they are supposed to be.
Now I've set the "Quiet Hours" setting to permanently on so no notifications are permitted.
I observe the Internet as an unfriendly place to study and take in information. Ads that move, shake, and make noise do so to tug at that primary fear of a predator or by exploiting the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventral_tegmental_area, amongst other methods. Psychologists have worked with advertising platforms like Facebook, Google, etc. to min-max and game-ify breaking our attention as much as they can. Its like they moved a really bad band and some actors into every one of our libraries and marked up all the pages with ads. The mobile platform extends the reach of these platforms. Maybe we need the computers to put us on a diet automatically; rate limiting or setting a maximum daily dose after which all ads and notifications are turned off or extremely limited. Seems like just a simple matter of programming :-)
But yea, simply having a smartphone around makes you want to fiddle with it. I would guess there is some addictive component there, as it impacts nearly everyone.