For Bea, it was moments like when she caught herself scrolling through messages on the toilet that made her want to reevaluate her relationship with her phone.
A 37-year-old woman from London began to feel uncomfortable with how ping notifications interfered with her life and the urge to pick up her phone. So when her iPhone broke over a year ago, she decided it was time to switch to a device that allowed her to stay in touch with others while minimizing distractions.
Bea, who has two young children, opted for the Nokia 2720 Flip – a phone which is styled as a ‘modern twist on the classic flip phone’. She made the decision after reading research on the impact of screen use on children. “I found myself breaking all the rules I had around them, crawling and scrolling,” she said. “A line was crossed – I didn’t want them to think it was a normal way to spend life, even though it is normal.”
Another trigger was learning more about the ways smartphones and social media were designed to be addictive. “I felt a wave of anger that these people have to make decisions every day about how I spend my life,” she said.
Almost two decades after the first iPhone was launched, a trend towards lower-tech devices seems to be taking shape, with a growing minority trading in their smartphones for ‘dumb phones’ – or perhaps, in Bea’s case, stupid.ahem telephones. “I chose this one because it has WhatsApp – it’s too complicated to live without it,” she said.
With new models like the Boring Phone, the trend is fueled in part by young people’s suspicion of the data- and attention-grabbing technologies they grew up with, as well as a desire to live more offline. And while smartphones are an obvious target of the trend, the “newtro” movement (a portmanteau of “new” and “retro”) heralds a resurgence of analog media, including tapes and fanzines, against the backdrop of the ongoing, and – heralded, vinyl boom.
While Jess Perriam, 39, was consumed by her Instagram feed, she knew she wanted to have a window into the lives of others. So she turned to Postcrossing, a website that connects people who want to send and receive postcards from strangers around the world. “I still wanted to have that connection with people and learn more about different cultures, but not necessarily in aggressive marketing,” she said, adding that she gets “loads of reading recommendations” through the post.
The community has more than 800,000 members in 207 countries and has received 77 million postcards since its launch in 2005. Although its fastest growth occurred in the early 2010s, it has endured even during the pandemic and 400,000 postcards are posted each month.
While the hobby is reasonably affordable in Australia, where Perriam lives, she notes that in other countries she has visited, the cost of stamps has become prohibitively expensive. In addition to writing with people she has never met, she also corresponds with an old friend in the US. Sitting down with a cup of coffee, Perriam feels he can have a thoughtful conversation. “It makes me sit down and think about what I want to tell my friend — what are the headlines, what would she want to hear about?”
The pair began this correspondence years ago when Perriam’s boyfriend lived in West Africa. “You feel like you can really catch up with someone – she was able to share bits and pieces of her daily life in Benin. I now have a collection of letters that are a memory of her time [there]and there is someone who really understood her.
“There’s something really special about the physical evidence of our lives in each other’s letters,” added Perriam. “[There is] tangible evidence of friendship that we can look back on – we have built a history that is truly tangible.”
Touch and other physical senses are also important to David Sax, the author of the book The Revenge of Analog. “We are haptic,” he said. “One of the advantages of analog is its tangibility—things you can use, touch, taste, and smell. We were supposed to live in a digital future… The experience of the pandemic showed us one truth that we kind of downplayed: we have bodies that exist in the physical world and we need to go places and touch things. We want more of the world than what is available on 20cm glass.”
Sax said analog’s appeal is here to stay, pointing to vinyl, film camera sales and the shelf life of paper books, but also the post-pandemic surge in in-person experiences like live music events and travel. But he doesn’t see it as a backlash against the encroachment of technology into our daily lives; he says that most people who embrace the low-tech movement also use new digital technologies where it is convenient and efficient. Instead, it’s “a counterbalance to this thing that has become the default mode for many things in life.”
Rather than a purely nostalgic reflex, those who reach for film through their smartphone camera are often not from the generation that grew up with analog technology, Sax noted. “Fujifilm Instax Driven Market [instant camera] is a teenager. The best-selling records are by Taylor Swift,” he said. “The younger generation is driving the change – those older generations who grew up with analogue are nostalgic but often captivated by the magic of digital.”
For Andreas Nygren, a 25-year-old student from Tallinn, the physical nature of film is partly what draws him to it more than digital photography. “With analog, you have to engage much more closely with what’s going on—you’re much more in touch with the environment and the light,” Nygren said.
Nygren also experimented with social media and the smartphone completely, but found it difficult to stay in touch with friends and university projects. “When you’re not active and you don’t post, people just forget about you and you don’t get invites,” he said. Instead, they are trying to ditch most social media platforms in favor of text messages and WhatsApp. “It’s about intentionality—you’re not tapping and scrolling, you’re thinking about saying something to a specific person.”
Over time, he observed how over-reliance on digital technology made him feel distant from the physical world. “It diminishes the vibrancy of life and makes you feel as if you are floating in a daze. It’s like being stuck in a cave watching a wall of shadows instead of being in the world. Analogue [trend] it is really just an effort to counter it and recapture embodied reality.’