Smartphone makers will soon face an unlikely competitor. Concerns about the impact of social media are driving demand for old-school Nokia brick-like handsets…
I think flip phones are more likely. I’ve contemplated several times of turning my phone in for the old flip phone. Might just be the nastalgia talking though.
The whole focus of concern about social media is on kids being exposed to material their parents don’t want them to see. I think this misses a much larger point - simply the effect social media overuse has on attention span and encouraging superficial thinking.
Scrolling through the firehose of infinite content trains people to process each item as quickly as possible and make a quick value judgement based on minimal information before moving on to the next item. This is absolutely backasswards of how kids should learn to think. It encourages binary thinking - seeing every issue as two opposite extremes - and spending as little effort as possible acquiring information before making that binary decision about who to idolize or demonize. Degrading people’s intellectual process makes them much more susceptible to suggestion and conditioning, which of course is how oligarchs want us.
I heard about the Light Phone recently and I think it’s a decent bridge between the old brick phones and modern smartphones. It has navigation and music functionality that a brick phone wouldn’t, but doesn’t have all the rest of the attention thieving bloat of a smartphone.
It would be nice to have music streaming capability and alternative messaging apps (Signal) and perhaps a web browser, though.
Just disable everything on your phone right now down to the essentials. If you’re on Android, there’s a lot of really minimalist 3rd party launchers like Niagara launcher that can improve the minimalist experience as well. You’d basically mimic the light phone at that point while still having every upside and be able to selectively enable and disable what you’re asking.
You don’t need to pay for an overpriced phone to take your choices away. You can find the will power to just disable it on your current phone.
600 dollars
this is a joke, right?
Truthfully 800, but there is an old model that costs “only” 300…
Do have any idea about the engineering required to remove all of the bloat?!
/s
We still need some way to fix the endless robocall and fraud spam that we can’t even block because they’re always using a different number
Make phone companies legally responsible for giving thousands of new phone numbers to scammers. They have zero control on who they give phone numbers because that’s cheaper.
The sooner one of their CEOs is put in prison over that they will take immediate measures to only give phone number to legit companies.
I contacted my phone company about them and they just went " There’s nothing we can do so just block them".
They’re using your fucking system, do something about it!
I’m alwaus very nice to them, but I also firmly explain that I’ll search for anything I want all by myself.
Last caller asked if I lived in an appointment or a house (selling ev panels or heating or something I guess), I switched around and asked how he lived, after a confused but correct answer (he lived in an apartment) I asked him where he lived, mini hilarity ensued. I wished him a good day and courage because its probably not the funniest job, I think he got a small genuine happy happy, or so his voice sounded.
Have got zero calls since.
You’re lucky to get a human to call you, I only get robocalls, literally zero humans on the other side of the line, either trying to convince me to borrow money or a fraud attempt trying to convince me “a purchase was just made on your account, press 1 to confirm or 2 to talk to our support” - on the latter, a human sometimes answers when you press 2, but they deserve all the shit you can throw at them because they’re fucking fraudsters and they know it.
It’s a easy fix with software, exactly like flight mode they can introduce focus mode for school.
