Retro Phone Gear Surges, Untethering Not for All

There's a gadget doing well in Australian online stores at the moment that retrofits a smartphone into a landline.

You plug a coiled, corded handset into the charging port, and the smartphone is suddenly attached to a clunky plastic receiver you hold to your ear, cord dangling, the way phones worked before they became small and mobile enough to fit in a pocket. It costs about A$20, and appears to be a retro novelty accessory.

What looks like a quirky fad may be a reflection of something deeper that I've been observing in my research on smartphone use in recent years.

We've come a long way from Nokia "bricks" with chunky buttons to sleek smartphones we keep close at all times. But after several decades of moving closer to our devices, more people are now looking for ways to gain some distance again. At the same time, this distancing isn't available for everyone. So what's going on?

From 'snug tether' to a loosening grip

More than two decades ago, Japanese cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito described the mobile phone as offering a "snug and intimate technosocial tethering": constant, lightweight, enabling both connection and mobility at the same time.

Since 2007, smartphones have been designed specifically for the human hand. They are made of touchscreens that respond to bare skin, the weights and sizes are engineered to fit in the palm without strain, and the interfaces are built for effortless scrolling, tapping, swiping and pinching.

Over the past decade, I've seen how deep that fit runs in my own research with Australian smartphone users. In one exercise, I asked people to hold their smartphone and tell me what it meant to them. Some rotated it slowly in their palm. Some closed their eyes and held it to their chest. "I'd be lost without it," one person told me. "It's my world," said another.

I first observed the loosening of that grip during research I published with Ingrid Richardson on shifts in mobile media use during COVID lockdowns. Several participants described their smartphone becoming less appealing, useful or practical once they were confined to their homes and all aspects of life moved onto laptops and desktops.

One participant said:

I spend all day on my laptop, the last thing I want to do is look at a tiny mobile phone screen.

Another said her smartphone sat on silent most of the time:

often it's not even in the same room as me anymore.

This was a useful insight that the hand-device tethering can loosen depending on circumstances.

A collective untethering?

What's different now is that the loosening of the tether is becoming increasingly deliberate, collective, and designed and legislated for.

Lockable pouches are becoming more common at smartphone-free concerts and events. School bans on smartphones are becoming increasingly common in Australia and globally.

In Amsterdam, a group called The Offline Club runs " reading raves " where attendees arrive with devices switched off and tucked away out of sight for the whole session. ( Melbourne has similar Book Doof events , although they don't explicitly mention no devices.)

A company called Coilie sells a wall-mounted dock with a coiled cord that tethers the user's smartphone to a fixed spot in the home, resembling its landline predecessor. The Coilie boldly promises to "give your phone a home, your mind a rest, and your nervous system a reset".

One woman in my research told me she used to lock her smartphone in a drawer at work because she couldn't stop playing Candy Crush while on shift. She needed a physical distance between herself and her device. Coilie is providing this form of distancing through a retro landline accessory for the home.

Untethering isn't for everyone

But not everyone gets to loosen the tether so easily. Much of my research has examined how Australian women use their smartphones to feel connected with trusted contacts when outside the home, especially at night.

What my research found was that many women use their smartphone and GPS apps as a way of engaging in personalised " digital safety nets ". This looks like routine practices of "text me when you arrive home", following each other's whereabouts on Snapchat's Snap Map feature, or using specifically designed safety apps such as Life360 .

For a lot of the participants I've spoken with over the past decade, their smartphone provides a tether to connect with family, partners and friends. Asking someone to switch off, lock their device away, or leave it in another room assumes a level of safety that not everybody can take for granted.

The real question raised by smartphone-free events and retro accessories isn't simply whether we should (or shouldn't) untether. It's who gets to, and under what conditions.

Jess Hardley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.