Is it you, or is it the phones?

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Nanzeeba Ibnat/Getty Images

Finding it hard to concentrate? Are you glued to social media for longer than you’d like? Well, maybe it’s not you… maybe it’s the phones.

Ninety one percent of Americans own a smartphone, and over half of adults say they spend too much time on their phones. With phones so ubiquitous, how do we step away? In a conversation for It’s Been a Minute, host Brittany Luse is joined by Magdalene Taylor, writer, cultural critic and senior editor at Playboy, and Fio Geiran, producer at TED Radio Hour and a writer of their Body Electric newsletter. They get into the effects that smartphones have on our brains, how some people are returning to “dumbphones,” and why it might take more than willpower to manage our relationships with our phones.

Episode Highlights

What smartphones do to our brains

FIO GEIRAN: The effects of your phone are there even when you’re not using it at all. [One] study showed that even when the phones are completely silent, there’s still a pull at our attention. [In an] experiment where participants put their phone on silent and either had them on their desk face down, in their pockets, or in a completely [different] room, the closer the phone was to the person, the more it pulled them from the task that they were doing … even if the phone was completely silent. We spend so much mental energy listening and looking out for these random messages from our phone. So it kind of makes sense that our attention is being pulled in that direction, even when we don’t realize it.

The appeal of the “dumbphone”

FIO GEIRAN: We’ve seen people either trading in their phone and downgrading for a flip phone – or at least talking about it a lot and thinking that it might fix them. But the most recent evolution of this trend is TikTok’s current fascination with the BlackBerry. I think a lot of young people are seeing BlackBerrys kind of as the sweet spot between a flip phone that doesn’t do too much and the modern smartphone that is doing way too much. And I think that you could also chalk this up to some of the retro tech early aughts admiration, but I think that this is more than the aesthetics. In [a 2022] Gallup poll, over half of adults [reported] feeling like they’re on their phones too much. Well, the stat jumps to 81% when you’re just looking at people from 18 to 29.

BRITTANY LUSE: Wow. That’s interesting. So it’s like that 18 to 29 group is both in too deep, and aware that they’re in too deep.

MAGDA TAYLOR: I think that for the younger generation of people who are considered digitally native, many of us just simply don’t really know another way of existing without being on our phones constantly.

FIO GEIRAN: Yeah, I mean, I think this interest in dumbphones, I think there’s a sense that older models of phones just seemed very fun in a lot of ways. The design is not quite as addictive. You can get a pink phone, you can bedazzle it. And I also think that there’s a bit of revisionist history happening here. People used to call it the CrackBerry just because it was so hard to put it down.

How to renegotiate our relationships to our phones

MAGDA TAYLOR: I think that the ubiquity of the phones and how they have become compulsory is just all the more evidence of how we do have some personal responsibility here to think about our relationship with this product that we only marginally have a choice in using now. And so I just think that we are at a point where we do need to be asking ourselves if this relationship with our phones is benefiting us, and if it’s not quite giving us what we want from it, then what can we do to improve it?

FIO GEIRAN: I think the best way to kind of get some space from it is to set yourself up in situations where you’re feeling a pull to something bigger than your phone. Whether that’s you spending time with nature or hanging out with friends, I think even having just solo time where you’re being very, very intentional and trying to sit with yourself. I think that this isn’t really about your willpower. I think it’s more about creating moments of connection that kind of interrupt some of the phone habits that we’ve gotten stuck in.

This episode was produced by Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Kwesi Lee. Our Supervising Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our Executive Producer is Veralyn Williams. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.