Anti Social Media, Youth, And Feature Phones

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A year or two I read about how young people were switching to feature phones from smart phones and I thought it was about nostalgia and fashion. As a person who grew up with "feature phones" as they improved and evolved, and as a person who was either trapped at a laptop or desktop I couldn't fathom why someone would want to disconnect by using a feature phone, rather than a smart phone.

Within the last year or two I do understand that pivot towards feature phones. In the 90s, and then the 2000s when we joined social network they were empty so we connected with people who spoke about things that interested us. Because the community was small, on web forums which I wrote about in the "Weaving the World Wide Web" part of my blog in the 90s, I was part of NoChickTrix and The Flipside. We talked between us. We were just 20-30 people on each site so we "knew" each other.

In parallel we had ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger and other IM platforms to talk with friends, and strangers in chat room like environments, or by DM.

Twitter became a more global extension of this via a website that we could also use by SMS for when we were mobile. At first Twitter was so small that we could look at the global timeline. We actually had to look out for when we were mentioned. We had to invent the "at reply" and we had to wait for the "at reply" to become a tab that would automatically detect when we were mentioned.

In my eyes this was the golden age of social media because we had to be engaged, we had to be devoted to be part of the community.The more we invested, the more we got out. We went to tweetups, we were invited to Alpha social networks, and beta projects, such as Seesmic for example. It was a true network of friends of friends.

Facebook, in the early days required a Uni e-mail, but it also required for us to wait for our university to be added, so that we could become part of the community in turn. As a result of this Facebook was a network of friends we knew in person, that we remained connected with online. It was more convivial. It meant that the events we saw were with friends and friends of friends. It was a tight knit community.

If we slide sideways Twitter became more cold when two things happened. Hashtags, and the lure of having a million followers. The issue with hashtags is that it allowed people who were not invested in a conversation to hijack it, or to give the illusion of engagement when they were spamming the timeline.

With the million follower fantasy we went from a social network of people following a thousand people they knew to strangers following strangers, and not understanding that follows were for friends, and active conversations.

As I said at the time, I will not follow someone that does not have the time to reply to me, for two reasons. The first being that if I at someone that ignores me I make noise, and the second, that if I give my attention I want something back. I found that by being ignored too many times my emotional well being declined.

For other people, who came to twitter later, a tweet or reply was like a "pavé à la mare". By this I mean that people expected to follow thousands, and to throw a brick in the pond, to see if anyone reacted, with no inkling of tight knit community that was gradually lost.

The paradox is that this community was lost within a year or two. By 2007 the golden age of Social media had passed. Maybe it's due to me moving away from London, but I think it has more to do with the growth in popularity of social media.

## How Does This Connect to Young People and Feature Phones?

In the early days of social media when you signed up to a service the timeline was empty, until you followed someone, and then followed someone else. It filled up as you saw one person speak with another. It grew organically so that everyone became part of a network of friends of friends.

Today if you use Instagram, or Facebook, or Twitter, or even the Fediverse the timeline is full instantly. With Twitter, Facebook and Instagram it's filled by the algorithms so in theory you don't need to "follow" anyone for two reasons. The first reason is that algorithms will not show you the posts by people you follow and secondly because there is so much traffic that it's hard to create a strong personal connection with any other human being.

I wrote human being but the terms used by corporations and PR firms is "influencers" and "content creators". Yesterday [a parent from my generation](https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/article/2024/may/27/australia-social-media-facebook-ban-children-under-16) wrote about how a ban on social media for teenagers would not help. She said that teenagers would find other ways to connect. Back in our day we had paper notes, and then SMS, and then MMS and more.

That's where the feature phones come in. If children and teenagers from the same generation have the same feature phones then they can SMS, MMS, Whatsapp and more. They don't need to connect via FB, Twitter, IG or the Fediverse. They can connect as children or teenagers from the same school in whatsapp groups, like hikers, climbers and more people do. For 30 to 90 CHF you can get a feature that connects you with friends, and with a phone that you can drop, and not need to charge for days at a time.

The key point, I feel, is that social media is no longer a community at a human scale. Between algorithms, adverts and more we see content by complete strangers, rather than close friends. We are bombarded and harassed by stuff we have no interest in. I believe that this is one reason for trolling, flame wars and more. In a social network filled with strangers we never get human connections. Without that human connection we have no reward for being on the social network.

## False Notifications

Another issue is that TW, FB and IG give false notifications. They tell you that you have a notification but it's not because of a like or a comment based on our activity. It's FB, TW or IG nagging us about groups we're in, or "chats" we're following. On IG we can follow "chats" except that the chat is not a conversation. It's yet another form of "content creators" nagging us.

## Social Media Are Not Social Networks

For a long time I held the ideal that social media were social networks but they are not. They exist to harvest our data, convince us that we want to go somewhere, or buy something, or other. If you use Instagram without pound signs you don't exist.

If you use FB you will not see the content by friends, you will see the crap that algorithms want everyone to see. As I have said for a while, a decade or two ago viral meant something. Today it means that someone gamed the algorithms. We see things because algorithms show them to us, rather than because friends shared them.

TW, some FB groups, Quora and Reddit are dead, because it's more likely that you will be trolled, than have a pleasant conversation if you post publicly. In such an environment do you want to be on Social Media? I don't.

## Of Smart Phones and Social Media

Smart phones and social media are synonymous of each other. iPhones thrived because of twitter, Nokia phones because of Jaiku, and Android because of both. There was a time when people spoke about social media addiction and I always thought it was rubbish, because we don't say that married people and families are addicted with each other. Social media is about people connecting with each other.

In 2024 people are not connecting with each other via social media, and if we don't use social media then we don't need smart phones. We can live with feature phones instead. By dehumanising social media, social media, and phone makers, are negating their raison d'être.

## Convinced

As I skimmed through Guardian articles about mobile phones I did question whether [younger people are interested in feature/dumb phones](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/the-boring-phone-stressed-out-gen-z-ditch-smartphones-for-dumbphones) because they have been indoctrinated. Did parents, schools and governments brainwash them into wanting dumb phones because they were encouraged not to want smartphones? I doubt it. I think there is a cultural shift. As social media became less appetising, so the phones that enabled social media use whilst mobile become less interesting.

## And Finally

It seemed, absurd, at first, that people would want to get feature phones, rather than smart phones, but with more thought, and in light of social trends, feature phones might make sense. They're lighter, less fragile, have better battery life and they're cheaper. They're also less likey to be band in certain schools. The other advantage is that feature phones have more character. All iphones look and feel the same, as do most android phones that look like slates, or slabs.

In the end, the appeal of feature/dumb phones could be down to "They're cheaper, and more resistant".