About nine out of 10 people in the UK now own a smartphone, a figure broadly replicated across the developed world. And we are glued to them - one recent study found that the average person spends 4.8 hours a day on their handset.
Yet for a small, but growing number of people, enough is enough.
Alex Dunedin binned his smartphone two years ago. "Culturally we have become addicted to these tools," says the educational researcher and technology expert. "They are blunting cognition and impeding productivity."
This, on its face, might seem a strange claim. You can do a lot with a smartphone. It can have your emails, your health, your time wasting, micropayment platforms of choice... ah.
It seems to me that the problem with smartphones isn't smartphones... it's apps and data.
Take Covid, for example. In NZ we have the Covid Tracing App, which you use to scan QR codes and maybe have bluetooth tracing on, for contact tracing purposes. This is useful and, frankly, kinda necessary. My mother spent months just writing stuff down which is, um, yikes when you realise that you're writing your contact details down on a piece of paper literally anyone can read. Without smartphones or something like them, I think there'd be a big problem. (Of course, there are some equity issues here.)
So, let's say you had a very stripped down smartphone experience... maybe it's got some songs on it, a camera, some space to store photos/videos, an internet browser, an email app, wifi capability, a non-interactive lifestyle app (say, a pedometer), office doc/PDF viewers and calls and text functionality. Is such a phone going to be something you can spend 4.8 hours a day on? Probably only if you're using it like a kindle. There's nothing else to really do on it but use the internet.
I guess, you might still have the "just watch the concert" problem because we've still got a camera, but I feel like outside of concerts, if you're taking a photo or recording a short video, you probably are actually experiencing the world... you've just got the phone out (of your pocket/bag) because of your experiences, not as a default. And since your stripped down experience lacks data... if you're out and about, your phone is basically a dumbphone, it's not a tether to the world that you're trying to get away from.
It seems very clear to me that people who suffer from smartphone addiction would be better served by just having a cheaper smartphone (that lacks space for a wide array of apps... and, indeed, possibly compatibility)... and not paying for data, than they would be ditching a smartphone. Let it be an all in one, rather than a thing itself.
Anyway, what say ye, NSG? Are you one of the people deciding to ditch your smartphone? Did you even have a smartphone to begin with?