The impact of vision impairment on living with congenital aniridia: a pan-European survey study.

Mobile internet has not only increased the efficiency of information transmission but also changed how individuals maintain connectedness, allocate attention, and organize everyday communication. As smartphones make online access continuously available, online availability has gradually become a default condition of daily life. Vorderer et al. (2016) [] described this communication environment as permanently online, permanently connected (POPC). In this context, Reinecke et al. (2018) [] defined online vigilance as a psychological state in which individuals maintain a sustained cognitive orientation toward online content and digital communication, heightened readiness to respond, and active monitoring tendencies. Unlike mere device-use frequency, online vigilance is a nonpathological orientation toward connectivity that includes both stable individual differences and situational fluctuations, and is associated with offline attention allocation, activity interruption, and mental fatigue [–]. Existing research on online vigilance has primarily focused on its measurement, structural validity, and associations with outcomes such as well-being, fatigue, and stress. Discussions of its antecedents have tended to emphasize the long-term shaping effects of the POPC environment, media affordances, and habits of connectivity [, ]. This leaves an important question insufficiently examined: Can online vigilance also be activated in the moment by specific relational events occurring offline during face-to-face interaction? If so, online vigilance should not be regarded only as a background orientation gradually internalized within a permanently connected environment; it should also be understood as a digitally oriented attentional state that may be triggered by social contexts. Among offline interpersonal events, phubbing provides a suitable entry point for addressing this question. Phubbing refers to the act of turning one’s attention to a phone during a co-present interaction and thereby snubbing the current interaction partner; being phubbed refers to the target’s experience of being ignored and marginalized []. Prior research shows that phubbing impairs impression formation and interaction evaluations [], reduces affiliation and conversational quality in face-to-face conversation [], and undermines relationship satisfaction in broader social or romantic relationships [, ]. At the psychological level, phubbing threatens basic psychological needs such as belonging and induces negative mood [, ], and it is also associated with reduced trust and dehumanization [, ]. David and Roberts (2017) [] further found that individuals who were phubbed experienced greater social exclusion and stronger attachment to social media. Thus, the consequences of being phubbed may extend beyond relational evaluations and emotional experience to later attention allocation and orientation toward digital cues.