Nyou phone, who is it?”
I expected to type this phrase with nostalgic glee – for the first time in two decades – when I switched on the new and improved Nokia 3210. Twenty-five years after its original heyday, the iconic mobile phone of my youth is getting a 2024 reboot – a savvy response to the growing backlash against the insidious side effects of intensive smartphone use. Unfortunately, I waited in vain: in order to send such a poor response, I would have to receive a text message first. But no one – not even my 72-year-old mother – sends texts anymore. They use WhatsApp.
It’s just one of many examples of how every aspect of life has adapted to revolve around the device in the smartphone era. And it doesn’t take long to realize that there isn’t a single inch of my existence that isn’t facilitated in some way by a palm-sized screen: my work, my social life, my love life, my travel, my finances. .
Back in the day, I always proudly identified as an “analog girl” (mainly because it sounded cuter than “luddite technophobe weirdo”). I preferred books to Kindles, kept an honest-to-goodness Filofax as a diary and continued to use a physical bank card to pay for things. I was such a late adopter that most people had left for a much cooler digital afterparty by the time I arrived.
I still remember drawing maps on scraps of paper whenever I was about to arrive at a new destination because paying extra for data seemed like an extravagant waste of money; I still remember a friend once swiping left on my smartphone to find a blank screen and asking in breathless horror, “Where are all your apps?
Cut to 2024, and while I’m still a long way from adopting it any time soon, my stubborn distaste for technology is no match for our mostly online society. I’m just as woefully addicted as the next digital junkie.
According to DataReportal’s 2023 research, the average screen time for users worldwide aged 16 to 64 is six hours and 37 minutes per day, of which three hours and 46 minutes are spent using a smartphone. UK adults spend the equivalent of 56 days a year on the internet, Ofcom research says, while my millennial demographic boasts the highest number of apps of any age group, with an average of 41. Again, the “analog girl” of old would be horrified: nowadays i have a total of 43 (not including the built ins my phone came with).
Lately, I’ve been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the ease with which I’ve slipped into this “new normal” – a life revolving around the device in my pocket. Recent research linking the mental health crisis in children and young people to the rise of smartphones makes for alarming reading; Confessions from those who have developed social media platforms, who acknowledge that they have created a monster, provide even more motivation to cut back. One tactic supported by activists, including social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the author Anxious generation, is to introduce better “basic” phones so we don’t give smart phones to kids. The popularity of these “dumbphones” – those with functions such as calling, texting and setting alarms – is growing, especially among Gen Z, of whom four in 10 worry they spend too much time on their smartphones. They are the only generation whose social media use has actually declined since 2021, reports say Guardian.
Suspicions about privacy, data collection and manipulation that keep us scrolling endlessly have led to trends like #bringbackflipphones on TikTok. Meanwhile, HMD, the company behind Nokia’s relaunch, has seen its flip phone sales double by April 2023. Retro tech is officially cool again.
So I found myself jumping on the offline bandwagon and excitedly unpacking the new 3210, the same model as my first mobile when I was a teenager, to see if swapping Samsung for this revamped brand of minimalism could help me re-engage in the real world . You’ll pay a premium for this level of nostalgia: it retails at £74.99, three times the price of the Nokia 105 dumbphone.
Things get off to an awkward start. I plug it in to charge it and nothing happens; I press the power button and get up. After 10 minutes of frantically trying different sockets, unplugging and plugging the charger and tapping every single button on the phone, I finally realize the obvious – the battery is still not in the handset. It’s been so long since I had a phone, where are you physically? could take out the battery I just… forgot.
My stubborn aversion to technology is no match for our mostly online society
Before I change the sim card, I download WhatsApp to my laptop – at least that way I won’t be a total social outcast – and mentally run through what else could be important from my smartphone.
Train tickets! They are all in the Trainline app. Okay, there must be a code on the station to print them. But no – try as I might, I can’t find anything that allows me to access the paper versions from the ticket machine. The only analog alternative is to print QR codes at home; of course, being a millennial, I don’t have a printer. Hmm. I decide I’m going to have to cheat and use my smartphone to get to London for work – I don’t think my boss would quite buy into the ‘my burner phone ate my homework’ excuse.
In more positive news, I’m quickly discovering that my new 3210 has a classic Noughties game, Snake. In fact, it’s the first question everyone asks me when they see my dumbphone: “Does it have one? Snake?” (Well, that and whether I became a drug dealer.) It’s as inexplicably compelling as I remember, though this version has been treated to jazzy color enhancement and the snake eats apples rather than dots. The game provides a welcome stand-in for what would my thumbs usually did: scrolling through social media until my brain turned to mush.
Other useful accessories include a flashlight, voice recorder, calculator and eight additional games. The phone also has 4G internet, which I really didn’t expect – the curiously basic functionality reminds me of the early days of the web and floods my head with wistful memories of MSN Messenger and Myspace. You can practically hear chirps, whistles and Nut-like the white noise of a modem dial tone when you click an icon. Ah, the memories!
I’m currently babysitting a friend and decide to try out the 2MP camera in my stripped down phone (a feature I’ve only ever dreamed of). The video of her beloved pets is gracefully slow-motion, the images slightly blurry. It’s a world away from the crystal clear world of my high definition smartphone that would capture every hair and allow me to edit my images into masterpieces. An unexpected benefit of amateur quality is that I don’t waste time filling my digital storage with hundreds of images. I take two photos, look at them, shrug how uninspiring they are, and send one to a friend. “Why are you writing me?!” he responds in horror – an answer I would soon become familiar with.
It’s time to catch the train, so I grab my Bluetooth headphones for the walk to the station, only to realize I can’t use them; There is no Spotify on my Nokia. Oh, it’s the sound of birdsong, cars and my own erratic thoughts. On the platform while waiting for the train, I experience the rarest thing – to be present and alone in a public place where nothing is occupying me. I usually switched between Twitter and Instagram, Slack and work email in that short downtime. Now I spend eight minutes in silence, looking at the trees on the other side of the platform and watching them move in the wind. It’s a bit weird. It’s quite nice.
This is perhaps the greatest advantage of analogy. Without social media and everything else, there’s nothing addictive about a phone—it’s just a lightweight, plastic communication tool. I spend the first few hours like any addict going cold turkey, jerking my hand in my pocket and compulsively unlocking the screen, only to realize there are no notifications, no prompts, no apps — nothing to grab my attention and drain my time. Every time I put the device back in my pocket, I felt a mixture of despondency and strange relief.
While I’m waiting for a friend to join me at the pub, I sit and listen to the conversations going on around me instead of chain-watching acquaintances’ Insta stories. I’m on the hour-long train ride home and open a book instead of Netflix. My mind is becoming less frantically connected; a powerless kind of peace descends.
It’s almost impossible to put the digital genie back in the bottle
But there’s no getting around the fact that so many elements of modern life are dependent on the smartphone, so opting out doesn’t really seem like a viable option. While I don’t love Instagram, it’s where I promote upcoming gigs for my fledgling but enjoyable singing side hustle. While I can technically access online banking through my computer, it’s a much more involved process than using my phone, requiring access keys and codes I no longer remember. While I look back on my hand-drawn map days with nostalgia, the cold, hard reality of trying to get by without Google Maps is excruciatingly frustrating.
Then there’s the authentication application I need to get into our work computer systems remotely; Uber, essential for my late night taxi needs; Dice with tickets to my concert; Vinted, where I buy 90 percent of my clothes; A rail card without which my discounted train tickets cannot be redeemed; Pray As You Go, which I use as my daily prayer practice and meditation; a ukulele tuning app that does exactly what it says on the tin; SwiftKey, which allows me to switch between letters and send a message in seconds… the list goes on. and further. and further.
That’s why much of the conversation about kids and tech revolves around the need to put off smartphone access for as long as possible. (St Albans, for example, has just announced its intention to become the first UK city to go smartphone-free for under-14s.) Once you’ve got one, it’s almost impossible to put the digital genie back in the bottle. Our lives and systems have evolved with our devices; the world of paper and physical things has largely been discarded.
While I don’t think I can completely give up my smartphone, my experience has made me realize that I could downsize my apps to the bare essentials and consciously leave them in my bag if need use it and make stricter rules – like not taking it out when I go for a walk or putting it in another room when I’m watching a movie. Even though I’ve simplified my phone, it’s made my life somewhat more complicated, it’s shown me a glimpse of an existence where I’m less dependent on it; an existence where I can mistake stimuli for immobility; and even better an existence where I finally beat my 2002 high score Snake. 🙂