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It’s time to bring back the dumb phone

It’s time to bring back the dumb phone

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January 31st, 2017

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This month has easily been the most Twitter-saturated of my life. As Donald Trump upsets the order of the civilized world, I now regularly find myself in a familiar instinctive pose — left arm folded in, supporting a right hand elevating a smartphone toward my face — reading about the world in a state of growing disbelief. 140-character parcels of angst and black humor hurtle past my eyes and bombard my brain, triggering some chemical reaction that’s at once unpleasant and yet intoxicating. I don’t like reading all this bad news on Twitter, and yet I can’t bring myself to stop. I’m unable to look away from the slow-motion train crash.

But I must. For the sake of my sanity and my gainful employment, I have to decouple myself from the unhappy news flow, at least sometimes. I’m sure that, while not identical, my experience is shared by many people, all of us struggling with the self-inflicted burden of being constantly connected. And the most logical remedy seems to be to reverse course and disconnect. At least sometimes.

One solution might be to revert to using a non-smartphone phone.

This is not as drastic a regression as you might think — or as it might have been a few years ago. In the age before paper-thin tablets and laptops, your smartphone truly was the only viable connected device you could carry around everywhere. But nowadays? I have paper pads thicker and heavier than the Apple MacBook, and Asus’ ZenBook 3 is even lighter still. You can tuck a tablet discreetly into a large jacket pocket, and it can connect to LTE networks. Basically, you can tote around all the function of a smartphone, and more, with relative ease, but you’d lose the immediate and constant ability to check up on things. And that’s the goal.

My problem with Twitter is that it fragments my attention and makes it extremely difficult to refocus after checking it for a casual look at my notifications. But, like the rest of the internet, I also find it useful, informative, and essential for my job. The trick is to make it harder to access, so that I access it less often. If this all sounds like I’m not in full control of my urges and instincts, that’s because I’m not. I recognize that being human means I’m only sometimes in charge of directing all of my actions and reactions.

So what does a dumb phone entail? It doesn’t just mean dumping Twitter; it also means no Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or any other superfluous distraction. No camera to force me to watch my life’s most interesting moments through a screen. A dumb phone’s most sophisticated feature should be its ringtone (and maybe a classic version of Snake) and its most valuable specs should relate to call quality. Yes, I imagine that a phone that acts mostly as a phone would nudge me toward calling people more often, which is a far superior and more human form of communication than a disjointed series of impersonal tweets. A dumb phone also lasts for a week at a time, because it’s not hyperactively communicating with every email, messaging, or cloud storage service I’m signed up for.

Dumb phones, as the one atop this article amply demonstrates, are much more characterful than the smart but indistinguishable slabs we now call our phones. Think back to those old school Nokias with mechanical flips and switches that felt so satisfying to just open and close. You could drop those on concrete or hardwood flooring and your immediate reaction would be to feel sorry for the floor. I miss that degree of durability and endurance, and I sometimes question if the thing I traded them away for is actually worth it. Do I really need to be contactable at every hour of every day? Or will the world of gadgets and consumer electronics tick along just fine if I checked in with it less regularly than every other second?

I know, even as I type this, that it’s not realistic for me to ever retreat to living a simpler life with a simple phone. Just as I know that if I did, I’d probably feel happier and be more productive because I’m not constantly interrupted by the attention grabber in my pocket.

Just as with food, we’ve come to a point with our internet consumption of having too much of a good thing. What I’m proposing is not that we stop eating, but that we make the calories that little bit harder to reach.