Addiction is not the right model for smartphones
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Your Phone Isn’t a Drug. It’s a Portal to the Otherworld."
Not just moving pictures, but windowed images, can be hypnotic.
Especially the more realistic or seemingly 3D, whether it's spatial depth or nested links.
Alice's Adventures reflects on a time when people were just getting accustomed to decent mirrors of increasing size, but they were nowhere near as common as today. Similar to movies, TV sets, CRT computers, and flat screens down to pocket-size, different people will be intrigued in different ways, especially on first impression. The imagination can often be triggered by the feeling that there is so much more beyond the "porthole", that is there but can not seen so easy.
Sometimes deeper engagement seems to reveal more, like changing channels or scrolling toward doom, which can be satisfying to an extent, other times there's no way to get deeper in and from that point may rely on pure fantasy as to what it's actually like to participate if you were not just confined to observing the images.
I guess that's how you end up with such a seemingly exaggerated account of what it's like "through the looking glass" :)