Dumbphones: Backlash Technology

“Dumb” mobile phones are here to free us from the hold of smart technology. But is going backwards really a solution?

There’s a new fancy mobile phone out that does something “amazing”: it just makes calls! Light Phone is designed for people who want a break from technology: it’s a sleek white phone the size of a credit card, and has a single telephonic function. “We’re not saying people shouldn’t use smartphones at all,” Light Phone co-founder Kawai Tang told ‘FastCoExist’. “We’re just saying that for certain moments – like taking your kid to the park, having dinner with your wife – those moments we don’t really need notifications from Twitter or Facebook or anything else.”.
That’s all well and good, except that Light Phone works by syncing with your smartphone, which you presumably leave at home during these chosen moments of technological abstainment. Pegged as “your phone away from phone”, the device aims to bring us back to basics. You could argue the better option for simplifying would be replace the lot with a basic mobile phone – it would be a lot cheaper – and just check social media on a computer.
Basic mobiles have been a small yet much-reported trend lately, as celebrities like Anna Wintour and Rihanna have been spotted using old-school flip phones. Whether this is done from a desire to simplify, or if it’s just a fashion thing, is unknown, but it’s not a bad idea: “dumb” phones are much more durable than smartphones, and they have battery lives an iPhone can only dream of. Then there’s the tactile feeling of a clamshell phone: “There was nothing more satisfying than the snap of the lid. It could speak of many things – purpose, annoyance, satisfaction. It was the perfect endpoint to a conversation, an onomatopoeic full-stop,” wrote Hannah Jane Parkinson in ‘The Guardian’.
It’s true: we may be a little more dependent on our phones than is strictly healthy . Any social media fiend who’s ever left their phone at home, only to twitchily but pointlessly reach for it all day, will know this. But the Light Phone is an extreme response, and arguably one that just adds more technology to the problem. Choosing a basic phone is an alternative, but then again lots of apps are genuinely handy: it’s hard to argue against being able to check when a bus or train is due to arrive.
The backlash against smartphone technology makes sense though, as mobile technology has progressed very quickly over a relatively short space of time. The solution isn’t to go backwards; the challenge is to work out how to live with technology without letting it run our lives. If you want to go for a phoneless walk, you can just leave it at home – if there’s an emergency, rest assured that everyone around you will have a phone! Or just keep the phone in your pocket, turned off.
This of course assumes you actually want to be less dependent on your mobile phone in the first place. It’s a terribly handy device that also provides much entertainment, so is that really that much worse than looking out the window? John Herrman contemplated this question in ‘Medium’, after he had to make do with a lesser phone after breaking his iPhone: “I came to believe that [the dumb phone] had helped me reconnect with my immediate surroundings, but quickly realised it had not. My idle moments were filled with idle thoughts and actions of similar or lesser value to another glimpse at the internet. … I had gone from compulsively checking my phone to watching others compulsively checking theirs.”.
What do you think? Should we strip our gadgetry back to basics or celebrate the innovative technology available? Tweets us @VPSNET.