I watch a small child expertly navigate his mother’s iPhone 12. He is a master at declining incoming calls, and yet, he is a slave to YouTube’s auto-play function. I see a high school student walking to school, juggling a backpack and a sports bag, her hockey stick protruding. Despite these obstacles, she still manages to scroll. Is this an inevitable feature of our evolution? Is the separation between self and smartphone really wearing so thin?
Philosopher Byung Chul Han writes of multitasking, positing that it is “commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness”. He goes on to state that “the animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing because it must also process background events.”
In a sense, we are like these animals. When our day-to-day lives are punctuated by notifications and elongated periods of endlessly scrolling, it is unsurprising that we struggle to “immerse [ourselves] contemplatively” in what we are experiencing.
Early last year, both the ABC and the New Yorker confirmed this rumoured rise in interest in low-technology, indicating that there’s a growing attraction to the idea of trading in smartphones for dumbphones (though dumbphone sales are still dwindling). Over the past decade, we’ve been hit with a barrage of anti-tech rhetoric denouncing smartphone use. The digital detox movement has been steadily gaining traction, with figures like author and professor Cal Newport at the helm. Documentaries, like The Social Dilemma, have also increased our awareness of the consequences of excessive screen time.
It feels as though low-technology, a modest screen time, and a sparse social media presence have all become synonymous with intellect, self-discipline, and moral superiority. Those who have abandoned their iPhones and resisted the pull of short-form content have seemingly ascended to a superior status. Dumbphone use in particular has come to represent restraint and autonomy. It’s chic to carry around a brick phone.
This hasn’t always been the case. Andy Sachs, the protagonist of the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, tosses her T-Mobile Sidekick 2 cellphone into a fountain after incessant messaging and calls from her tyrannical boss. Take Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird. Set in the early 2000s, Timothée Chalamet’s character Kyle condescendingly praises Ladybird for not owning a cellphone. He calls her a “good girl” and muses that “the government didn’t have to put tracking devices on us. We bought them and put them on ourselves.”
As we become further entrenched in the digital world, we begin to feel nostalgic for the halcyon days where our tech was tethered to physical locations. Or, at least to a time in which our handheld devices were only capable of executing a few basic functions. For those of us who feel fatigued by our constant availability, and the ease with which we can turn our brains off by consuming rapid-fire short-form content, the allure of the dumbphone is at times overpowering. But is switching to a dumbphone enough to emancipate us from the online world? Is this emancipation necessary?
The online world, for all of its drawbacks, is still important. A full separation from it would deprive us of the connectivity and creativity that it can offer. Admittedly, much of my personal taste has been shaped by my internet use. Through my introduction to social media at a very young age, I was able to discover countless albums and novels that I would never have found. I’ve also maintained friendships throughout the years that would have otherwise withered.
What this nascent interest in low-technology suggests to me is not a desire to delete smartphones and the online world from existence, but rather a desire to drive a wedge between ourselves and our devices. The digital sphere, and our connection to it, will continue to exist regardless of whether it’s in our pocket or not. Maybe the dumbphone is insufficient in fully liberating us from a world which demands our attention and perpetual availability, but what it represents is important. The dumbphone’s resurgence is a reminder of the need to set boundaries with technology. It is imperative, now more than ever, that we begin to assert a clean division between our online and offline lives.
