OPINION: My fling with a “dumbphone” was an eye-opening distraction. If only it could last, writes Molly Roberts.
By: Molly Roberts
THIS year, the world got serious about smartphone addiction. The Los Angeles Unified School District, which just banned mobile devices on campuses, is only the latest body to try to pry these tools from students’ hands: 1 in 4 nations have similar policies or laws. The US surgeon general wants to slap warning labels on social media, a la cigarettes — another way of trying to cut down the time teens and tweens spend staring at their screens.
But as usual, the kids are way ahead: Some of them are apparently taking their smartphones away from themselves.
The so-called dumbphone has returned to vogue in 2024. Think the Motorola Razr, sleek for its time but an anachronism now with its number pad and flip-open design. Or think even dumber — for instance, the Nokia 3310, basically a plastic brick with a monochrome display. And it’s not just the young folks who seem to be embracing the technology of yesteryear. Two groups, according to news reports, are especially enamoured: Gen Zers who disdain the capitalist elite of Silicon Valley … and the capitalist elite of Silicon Valley.
Put all that together, and trading out an iPhone for a less sophisticated predecessor is an experiment no tech columnist could resist. So I didn’t.
Exactly how dumb is a dumbphone? That’s really up to you. You can browse Reddit’s r/dumbphones or the nifty, searchable Dumbphone Finder until you’re exhausted: maps or no maps, podcasts or no podcasts, web browser or no web browser. The Nokia TCL Flip Pro seemed to me to possess a Goldilocks level of intelligence: Functional but definitely not fancy, it could do many things but few of them well. Calling people, check. Texting them … well, sure, but T9 prediction is hardly AI. The phone seemed to nudge me exclusively toward words I did not want to type. The number key corresponding to the letter “I” oddly defaulted to “G”. Too lazy to fix it, I gave up: “G will be there soon,” my messages read. “Should g pick up anything from store.”
I could play games, but only bad ones. Remember “Snake,” where you guide a pixelated, ever-growing serpent to consume as many apples as possible without running into its own tail? All I can say is, it’s no “Candy Crush.” I could even visit The Post’s website – but scrolling from one paragraph of an article to the next took approximately 30 seconds. Few people, after years of constant digital gratification, have the patience for that anymore. Of course, there was plenty the TCL Flip Pro couldn’t do at all. Trying to meet up with a friend in an unfamiliar city? Can’t drop a pin. Have two-factor authentication turned on for e-mail and Slack? Best of luck! Need to check your bank account balance? There is decidedly not an app for that.
These are all, ostensibly, downsides to the dumbphone. Yet they came with a tremendous upside: I started looking less at my screen and more at everything else. I read books without stopping to check my notifications — and settled into the stories the way I did as a child. I walked through Central Park on a trip to New York and, podcastless, heard the buskers and the birds and the seniors and the summer interns all at once. Some people sat next to each other on benches saying nothing at all — because they were looking at their iPhones.
At dinner with my dad, there were no conversational lulls filled with brief glances at X or Instagram; there were only comfortable pauses followed by more talk. I had left my phone behind, because what was the point in bringing it? When he went to the restroom, there wasn’t a screen to occupy me. There was only me.
Shedding my reflex to touch my device at all times, and to gaze at its screen at idle ones, was perhaps the strangest part of having a dumbphone. It was likely the most meaningful part, too. Yes, you can strip your smartphone of TikTok, Instagram, X or whichever siren’s song you can least resist. But you can’t make your smartphone stop being smart, which means that it, much like your smart friends, will always have something interesting to offer. The dumbphone has almost nothing interesting to offer. There’s no need to resist temptation, because there is no temptation. And, finally, you’re free.
Yet it turns out that’s not even really an option. As long as everyone around you knows you possess a tool capable of so much, they expect you to use it: to always be, as your phone is for you, at their fingertips. And while you can break your own smartphone-induced habits, you can’t break theirs. You can’t break society’s, either.
Turns out a dumbphone is a terrific conversation starter, and multiple strangers told me during my experiment that they, too, had dumbphones in the smartphone era — but had been forced to abandon them. Sometimes their jobs demanded it. Sometimes, in the case of one man whose Philadelphia Eagles season tickets turned digital-only, the NFL did. I couldn’t have ditched my smartphone for even a few days had my employers not been the very ones who, for the purpose of this column, told me to. I couldn’t have gotten through the time I spent without it had my partner not taken on some key tasks — how else would the dog’s playgroups, managed by app, have been scheduled?
We may yearn for the freedom from all the extraneous stuff embedded in our smartphones — the distractions from the world around us — but liberty comes at the cost of becoming cut off from all the essentials, too: the constant connectedness that the same modern world demands. Perhaps it’s no wonder that those who spend the most time with dumbphones these days are the youngest, with the fewest responsibilities, and the richest, who can have someone else perform their responsibilities for them.
Now my iPhone is back in my hands. My eyes are already on its screen more often than I’d prefer. A gloriously stupid $54 piece of plastic feels like an impossible luxury.
* Molly Roberts writes about technology and society for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.
– THE WASHINGTON POST
