Dumphones & Culture in the Digital Age

Dumphones are having a moment. This indicates sociocultural changes underway with both social media and how society is adapting in a hyperconnected world.

Photo by Thanos Pal on Unsplash

Some call them dumphones, feature phones, or to others, minimalist phones. Some are tiny, others about the usual size of today’s smartphone. Some really are limited while others do enable email and calendar access, much like the early Blackberry’s in the 00’s. None enable social media apps. Most are black & white or eInk. Sales are increasing. What’s going on?

While the biggest demographic for dumphone buyers today is Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), some Gen Xers are increasingly interested and Millennials (1981–1996) are finding them more attractive. That there is such multigenerational interest suggests a macro cultural shift in how we want mobile devices to adapt to us after we adapted to them.

Feature phones (dumphones) in 2022 saw sales largely in African and Middle Eastern countries, but sales are increasing in the USA, so probably in other Western countries. Influencers on YouTube are pushing feature phones as well.

This presents new opportunities for mobile innovations and marketers. It is suggestive of consumer behavioural shifts. One we are already seeing as consumer use of social media is shifting from using social media to be, well, social, to using it as entertainment. Actual socializing activities are moving to messaging apps like WhatsApp, iMessenger and DMs (Direct Messaging) in apps like Twitter (X), Instagram and TikTok.

As I wrote previously, the last phase a society goes through in adopting revolutionary technologies is that of adaptation, with the middle one being evaluation and the first, awareness. Smartphones have been with us nearly 20 years. I believe we are in the final part of the evaluation phase with regard to smartphones.

This is a sort of liminal time, usually around 20 years, but that can be longer, or shorter. It is notable that consumers are changing their opinions and views around smartphones at a time when internet access has become ubiquitous and easy and Generative AI tools have begun to emerge into broader society.

Gen Z as a demographic has watched Gen X and Millennials and how they use smartphones and social media, which helped form their opinions and values regarding smartphones and social media. While such demographic terms should be taken lightly and most statements made about younger generations are just generalizations and not factual. Generational cultural practices are still important to watch.

Culture is mutable, an ever shifting hard to define warp and woof of societies. Significant changes happen slowly, over longer periods of time than we tend to think and are more often than not, subtle rather than sudden. This relates to how we see and adapt technologies.

We tend to think that smartphones equate to Android and iPhones as the first ones with a polite nod towards the Blackberry. Yet the first cell phone was invented in 1973 and the first one to access the internet was in 2001. The earliest apps came out in 1994 with the IBM Simon. Here’s a lovely timeline of the evolution of cell and smartphones.

When I was on a business trip in the Philippines in the mid 00’s, doing an ethnographic study for a mobile device company, I met with a youth group in a school outside Manila. They all showed me their feature phones and how they’d scratched out the letters/numbers on the keypad. It was considered a point of pride to be able to use the phone without them! It was fascinating to see what they could accomplish and how fast. I saw the same practices in Kenya and Tanzania.

We shouldn’t expect everyone to drop their full-on smartphones all of a sudden. Nor is it likely that sales of dumphones are going to rapidly overtake those of smartphones. Yet smartphone sales seem to have reached a point of market saturation.

Social media habits are changing as well. Some analysts and journalists suggest that TikTok, with it’s very clever use of video, influenced Instagram and Facebook to shift to being just more video and less text. Even LinkedIn is trying a video first test. The “socializing” aspect of social media has shifted towards more private apps like WhatsApp, iMessenger, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and such. All still usable with some dumbphones. This is a topic for another article.

What I do believe we are seeing is the free market at work through a sociocultural reaction to how some segments of the population see not so much smartphones, but the way some apps are used. In part it’s a reaction to be surveilled and the volume of advertising.

But perhaps more so, a swathe of society that has become somewhat disenchanted with all the implications of smartphones, good and bad. Dumphones have less societal pressures around them, enable disconnect and fill a part of a social behaviour people generally enjoy; talking to one another. Humans prefer face to face the most. Largely because non-verbal communication accounts for over 90% of our social communication with one another.

If you experienced “zoom fatigue” during the pandemic where you felt rather brain dead at the end of a day of video meetings, it’s for good reason. Our brains aren’t quite wired for that form of communication where we can’t read body language.

The Light Phone and Minimal Phone are two examples of what I call Midphones, not entirely dumb but also not entirely smart, sitting somewhere in the middle. Both can do email, text, have cameras and you can listen to music and podcasts. Both are built on Android for obvious reasons. They are interesting and are a sort of comfortable middle between smart and dumb phones. They are intriguing devices.

Then of course, there’s the rabbit r1 AI focused device and the Humane AI Pin, while neither are phones, they can take calls and well, so can smartphones which we use for things other than being a phone. We’re in the extremely early stages of such devices and GAI as a tool. It’s just too early to say how they might disrupt the smartphone industry.

Perhaps then the biggest take-away is how culture at scale, is considering the role of smartphones and mobile computing as a whole in our society. We have evolved vehicles to serve us in different ways, from 4 cylinder cars to 8 cylinder SUVs, tractor trailers and so much in between. It makes sense then that we would see an evolution in various handheld communications devices.