For Bea, moments scrolling through the news on the toilet made her feel the need to reassess her relationship with her phone.
The 37-year-old from London began to feel uncomfortable with the way ping notifications and the urge to answer her phone were invading her life. 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 a Nokia 2720 Flip – a phone that describes itself as a “modern take on the classic flip phone”. She made her choice after reading research on the impact of screen use on children. “I found myself breaking all the rules I had around them when browsing and scrolling,” she said. “A line had been crossed – I didn’t want them to think this is a normal way of life, even though it is common.”
Another trigger was learning the ways in which smartphones and social media were designed to be addictive. “I felt a wave of anger because these people had to make decisions about how I spent my life every day,” she said.
Nearly two decades after the first iPhone was released, a trend towards lower-tech devices appears to be emerging, with a growing minority trading their smartphones for ‘dumb phones’ – or, perhaps in Bea’s case, dumb phones.uh Phones. “I chose this one because it has WhatsApp. It’s too complicated to live without,” she said.
With new models like the Boring Phone, the trend is fueled in part by young people’s distrust of the data- and attention-harvesting technology they grew up with, and an attempt to live more offline. And while smartphones are the obvious target of this trend, the ‘newtro’ movement (a portmanteau of ‘new’ and ‘retro’) heralds a resurgence of analog media, including cassettes and fanzines, against the backdrop of ongoing, and more-heralded, vinyl boom.
While Jess Perriam, 39, was exhausted by her Instagram feed, she knew she wanted to peek into the lives of others. So she turned to Postcrossing, a site 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 while aggressively marketing,” she said, adding that she receives “piles of reading recommendations” in the mail.
The community has over 800,000 members in 207 countries and has received 77 million postcards since its launch in 2005. Although the fastest growth occurred in the early 2010s, it has persisted throughout the pandemic, with 400,000 cards being posted monthly.
While the hobby is quite affordable in Australia, where Perriam lives, she notes that the cost of stamps has become prohibitive in other countries she has visited. In addition to writing to people she has never met, she also corresponds with an old friend in the US. When she sits down with a cup of coffee, Perriam feels like she can have an informed conversation. “It forces me to sit down and think: What do I want to tell my girlfriend – what are the headlines, what are the things she would like to hear?”
The couple began this correspondence years ago, when Perriam’s boyfriend lived in West Africa. “You feel like you can really catch up with someone – she’s been able to share bits and pieces of her daily life in Benin. Now I have a collection of letters that are a reminder of her time [there]and there is someone who really understood her.
“There is something very special about the physical evidence of our lives in each other’s letters,” Perriam added. “[There is] material evidence of a friendship to 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 revenge of analog. “We are haptic,” he said. “One of the advantages of analog is its tactility: things you can use, touch, taste and feel. There was the assumption that we would live in a digital future… The experience of the pandemic has shown us one truth that we kind of downplayed: we have bodies that exist in the physical world and that have to go places to do things to touch. We long for more of the world than what is available on 8-inch glass.”
Sax said the appeal of analog is here to stay, pointing to vinyl, film camera sales and the survival of paper books, as well as the post-pandemic rise of in-person experiences such as live music events and travel. But he doesn’t see it as a response to the invasion of technology into our daily lives; he says most people embracing the low-tech movement are also using new digital technology where it is convenient and effective. Instead, it is “a counterbalance to this thing that has become the default mode for many things in life.”
Rather than being a purely nostalgic reflex, those who turn to film via their smartphone camera are often not from the generation that grew up with analog technology, Sax noted. “The floating market of the Fujifilm Instax [instant camera] are teenagers. The No. 1 selling records are by Taylor Swift,” he said. “It is the younger generations who are driving the change – the older generations who grew up with analogue have nostalgia, but are often captivated by the magic of digital technology.”
For Andreas Nygren, a 25-year-old student in Tallinn, the physical nature of film is partly what draws him to it over digital photography. “With analog you have to be much more closely involved in what is happening – you are much more in touch with the environment and the light,” says Nygren.
Nygren has also experimented with forgoing social media and a smartphone, but found it difficult to stay in touch with friends and for university projects. “If you’re not active and you don’t send messages, people just forget about you and you don’t get invited to things,” he said. Instead, he is trying to ditch most social media platforms in favor of text messaging and WhatsApp. “It’s about the intention – you’re not just tapping and scrolling, you’re thinking about saying something to a specific person.”
Over time, he noticed how an over-reliance on digital technology made him feel distant from the physical world. “It reduces the vibrancy of life and makes you feel like you’re floating in a daze. It’s like being stuck in a cave looking at the wall of shadows, instead of being out in the world. The analogue [trend] is actually just an attempt to counter that and regain control over embodied reality.”