• Editorials

Toward a Strong Resurgence of the “Dumb Phones”

• By Cambodianess
• June 25, 2023 10:00 AM

A “dumb” phone is by definition the opposite of a smartphone. It is used as a phone and for text messaging. Period. You see how stupid it is. While the smartphone—like the one that just about everyone has—handles things whose list gets longer every day. First, it puts you in the network of a great many people across the world, friends but especially a large number of strangers with whom one Facebooks, one Telegrams, WhatsApps to name a few.

With the smartphone, we find information on anything and everything, expand our knowledge, watch videos, play, manage our bank accounts, pay, take our tension. We know how many steps we have taken since morning, how many we have to take before sundown to maintain a healthy heart, we keep track of the calories of the daily special at the restaurant, etc.

The phone does so many things—some of them useless but, oh well, we use them anyway—that it sucks the life out of us, that smartphone. And it lugs around so many false information, so much gibberish released and transmitted deliberately or not by people with dark motives, if not threatening freedom— criminals or terrorists—that this becomes disturbing.

How many depressed, hypochondriac, mythomaniac or paranoid people has it generated throughout the world since it appeared? Millions no doubt ever since it started to make us bow our heads toward its bottomless screen.

Getting rid of it? Too late.

However, a trend noted among young people in United States, should take on the world. As was mentioning a marketing director of Nokia Phone quoted by the online media Euronews Next, the sales of phones with basic calling and text-message features have increased in 2022 for HMD Global, Nokia’s manufacturer, with tens of thousands of phones sold each month. “We have doubled our share of the clamshell phone market over the past year, which is very important for us,” he said. “And we are now seeing that this market is gaining strength in Europe.”

The buyers, and especially the young buyers, seem to want to enjoy being in a disconnected world that, until now, they did not know. Not a 100 percent of course, but at least once in a while, during a weekend or while on vacation.

Staying away from the networks, from the information and disinformation overflow, letting go of the hunt for likes, getting away from work that intrudes into all aspects of your private life. At least for a short while.

Let’s hope this stupid-phone trend will cross the Pacific Ocean and come over here so that young people will be able to experiment and feel the exhilaration of being disconnected, of being off-network.

Have smartphones produced, since their sensational arrival on the market, more stupid people than enlightened ones to inform the world? We could not say. But the return of silly phones sounds like people becoming aware that their control over our lives must be regulated.