There’s a gadget doing well in Australian online stores at the moment that retrofits a smartphone into a landline.

You plug a coiled, corded handset into the charging port, and the smartphone is suddenly attached to a clunky plastic receiver you hold to your ear, cord dangling, the way phones worked before they became small and mobile enough to fit in a pocket. It costs about A$20, and appears to be a retro novelty accessory.

What looks like a quirky fad may be a reflection of something deeper that I’ve been observing in my research on smartphone use in recent years.

We’ve come a long way from Nokia “bricks” with chunky buttons to sleek smartphones we keep close at all times. But after several decades of moving closer to our devices, more people are now looking for ways to gain some distance again. At the same time, this distancing isn’t available for everyone. So what’s going on?

From ‘snug tether’ to a loosening grip

More than two decades ago, Japanese cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito described the mobile phone as offering a “snug and intimate technosocial tethering”: constant, lightweight, enabling both connection and mobility at the same time.

Since 2007, smartphones have been designed........

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