Purpose: This paper clarifies the contested and often loosely used concept of “digital addiction,” differentiates it from adjacent constructs (problematic use, excessive use, pathological use), synthesises the dominant theoretical accounts of its development and maintenance, and proposes an integrative conceptual framework with testable propositions. It deliberately adds a Library and Information Science (LIS) and information-behaviour lens to a literature dominated by psychology and public health.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper is a conceptual analysis. It adopts a purposive, integrative concept-analysis strategy informed by Walker and Avant’s eight-step method and Rodgers’ evolutionary concept analysis. Seminal works and recent (2020–2026) peer-reviewed, predominantly Scopus- and Web of Science-indexed sources were purposively selected and interpreted. No primary data were collected; all quantitative estimates are drawn from cited empirical studies and meta-analyses.

Findings: Digital addiction is best understood not as a single validated clinical entity but as an umbrella construct spanning generalised problematic internet use and several application-specific behaviours (gaming, social media, smartphone, pornography). Its recurring defining attributes are impaired control, salience or preoccupation, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal-like distress, conflict, relapse, continued use despite harm, and functional impairment. Antecedents are person-level, social and design-structural; consequences span mental health, sleep, academic and occupational functioning and wellbeing, though causal direction and effect sizes remain contested. Only gaming disorder has achieved formal diagnostic status in ICD-11.

Research limitations/implications: As a conceptual paper without primary data, the proposed framework and its propositions are analytic rather than empirically confirmed and require testing with longitudinal and culturally validated designs.

Practical implications: The paper maps a multi-level intervention architecture spanning individual, family, educational, platform-design and policy levels, and argues that academic libraries and information professionals are an under-recognised delivery point for digital wellbeing literacy embedded within existing information-literacy mandates.

Social implications: The analysis foregrounds the attention economy and persuasive platform design as structural antecedents, reframing digital addiction partly as a consequence of engineered environments rather than solely individual pathology, with implications for regulation.

Originality/value: The paper integrates an LIS and information-literacy perspective with the core psychology and public-health literature, offers a consolidated attributes–antecedents–consequences matrix, and supplies a synthesising Antecedents–Mechanisms–Moderators–Outcomes–Interventions (AMMOI) framework with propositions tailored to the Indian and South Asian context.