LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Smartphone phobia

A considerable return to flip phones is fully underway as ever more users abandon their smartphones and revert to the retro “dumbphones” of the late 1990s. In 2023, sales of the vintage phones in Canada rose 25 percent over 2022. All flip phones deliver voice calls and text messages, some also play music and keep a calendar, but none provide news reports, map apps, or most significantly, social media.

The impetus to this unexpected returning is evidently a progressively desperate need to flee the social harms and addictions of social media. Schools, for one, are increasingly banning student use of phones during school hours because, more than distracting classmates and disrespecting the educational process, they clearly disrupt the mental health of students. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness blames smartphones directly.

More broadly, a 2023 study from the University of Toronto employed a Smartphone Addiction Scale to assess over 50,000 participants from 195 countries, and found one third of people around the world at high risk of smartphone addiction. It also showed a consistent pattern of women scoring higher than men, and younger digital natives scoring higher than older digital immigrants.

In one sense, this deepening crisis is just another case of cultural lag, when non-material values and norms trail the rapid advance of material technology. Just as biomedical and gen-AI technologies have far out-paced biomedical and gen-AI ethics, so too digital media technologies have exploded without anticipating the unintended social consequences we now suffer. Indeed, the tyrannical technological imperative is to do something because we can, not because it is constructive.

Pernicious consequences of social media include absorbing erroneous misinformation, fraudulent disinformation, and hateful malinformation; battling personal insecurity and anxiety about keeping up, missing out (FOMO), and being watched (privacy of digital footprint); being connected to others without really connecting with them; paying continuous partial attention while awaiting the next notification; living reactively to external stimuli instead of reflectively about complicated reality; “phubbing” family and friends by scanning one’s phone in a social setting instead of engaging the people present; craving and trading in immediate attention and admiration; idealizing the inauthentic identities of “me-media”; over-sharing personal information due to online disinhibition; outright cyber-bullying minors and cyber-stalking adults.

Yet the average person now spends nearly five hours a day on their smartphone, totaling twelve years of the average lifetime. Gen Z’ers (born 1997-2012) spend around seven hours, which may explain why those same Zoomers are leading the current renunciation of smartphones in favour of flip phones. Ironically, many high-profile TikTok personalities are now taking up and talking up flip phones.

Nevertheless, with the gradual disappearance of paper products, smartphones have unfortunately become increasingly necessary to navigate streets, enter concerts, attend games, read menus, secure permits, apply for jobs, and more. While perhaps more environmentally responsible and in many ways more accessible and efficient, living more life online has also become more socially divisive, and not just politically.

The digital divide exacerbates social class differences between e-haves and e-have-nots. Smartphones are another case of monetizing and commercializing everyday life, as more people are forced to pay for apps and services they never use, leaving in their wake those who can only afford a much less expensive flip phone, or cannot afford a phone at all. What are your chances of getting any job if your potential employer cannot contact you by phone? What are your chances of retaining a higher-level job if you lack second-device internet authentication via a smartphone app?

Defiantly, ever more contemporary Luddites are choosing to live on the flip side, smartphone-free. Longing to live more immediately and less mediatedly, theirs is a smartphone detox for the purpose of mental health, a taking back of their own lives, as many express it. These “flippers” live the exhilaration of freedom from mindless scrolling, binging, and “flaming,” with minds free to be fully present to others, or to wander contemplatively when in silent solitude.

Five hundred years ago, French intellectual Blaise Pascal observed that “all of humanity’s problems stem from [the individual’s] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The digital revolution has made that insight more prescient and palpable than ever.