Chapter 9: The Light Phone
10 Insights from the Super Connected Tour: Rebalancing Digital & Analogue Life. Tool Nine in the 'Super Connected Toolkit' is: The Light Phone.
A Light-Hearted Digital Detox
When I began to actively remodel my digital life, the first thing I did was change all the icons on my iPhone to black and white. I had to simplify my visual experience of the phone and it’s apps because the over stimulation was too much for me to bear. That was the tip of the iceberg. It took months and months until my iPhone finally ended up in my cupboard of filming equipment, which is all I use it for now.
I heard about Light Phone back in 2019 but hadn’t managed to get hold of one, because they were mostly sold out of the international model at the time.
When I finally got one this year, just in time for the first tour of Super Connected, I realised all my efforts to re-analogue my iPhone were pretty much a subconscious craving for the Light Phone II - the most elegant mobile phone ever designed.
Lighten Your Eyes To Listen More
The Light Phone E-ink display is ideal if you need a screen to be as gentle on the eye as a paperback page from a book. I began to get anxious every time I had to use my eye-candy-fairground-ride of an iPhone. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it.
I also noticed the speed of my eye movements in sync with the speed of the apps, which is very fast. Intuitively, I felt it may be connected to my extreme eye-aches at the end of every day - which is when I love to work the most, on new songs usually.
After two weeks using the Light Phone II, I’m back in the evenings recording new songs until the early hours. For me, less digital distraction means more music and a hyper focused attention to sound, whether it’s music or a friend talking to me.
The evolution of everyday technology in the 21st century puts ‘vision’ before ‘sound’.
Captions, subtitles and mute buttons rule. Closing our eyes and using all our listening powers hasn’t been a mainstream occupation for a long time. But Light Phone could change that.
Send More Time
Since moving from my iPhone 12 Mini to Light Phone II, the amount of time I was getting back in my life was substantial. Actually, I wanted to calculate it and compare them for this blog, but I realised that would also be a complete waste… of time.
I do less on The Light Phone. But what I do is done with my full attention and ‘intention’.
The Speed of Light
If you believe faster is better and everything you do needs to be optimised to transcend the limitations of the human body and mind, then Light Phone might not be for you.
But I love limitations. Limitations challenge us and make us more creative. Using Light Phone, I gradually slow down to a pace that retunes my attention and clears my mind. According to NHS speech and language therapist Sandy Chappell, (author of How To Raise A Chatterbox), a reduction of screentime and increase of real time exchange of facial expressions when we talk to each other, vastly improves our communication skills. Especially when we are children.
Screentimers Synonymous
Addicts of smartphones are satirised in my new film Super Connected in a scene depicting a 12 Step Programme. When I wrote the script, it was imagined. But today it is real. This scene was inspired by the universal idea that, like anything else that is addictive, collective action is our best chance at a successful recovery.
In 2024, only a small percentage of smartphone usage is dedicated to actual phone calls. Studies show that a significant majority of smartphone time—up to 90%—is spent using apps and accessing various online content, rather than making voice calls. For example, in the U.S., only 24% of smartphone users report making phone calls daily, and about 44% make between one to three calls per day. This is in stark contrast to the 1980s when landline phones were used almost exclusively for voice communication. Our 20th century phones did develop our skills of listening, speaking and concentrating. They promoted healthy dialogue. Smartphones don’t do that.
Light Phone does.
The parent-led movement to change the digital norms of society and re-analogue childhood coincided with the release of the Super Connected album. I’ve talked with many head teachers and parent groups since we’ve been touring the album and it is extraordinary how the impact of smartphones on the mental health of students is even worse than the story in Super Connected. I was educated at a low-tech Rudolf Steiner School, so I’ve always been grateful that like technology itself, I was getting an evolution of tech when I was growing up, rather than full access to it all at once.
“We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
With the norm of silent messaging, the art of listening and conversation have suffered enormously in the early 21st century. As author Jonathan Haidt successfully argues in his book The Anxious Generation, ‘asynchronous’ communication causes anxiety in a way that good old fashioned real-time-in-sync conversations have never done.
We believe that Light Phone will play a pivotal role in bringing the art of real time conversations back. And that it will become the perfect first phone for a child.
The Sound of Light
I began multi-track recording when I was 12. In real time. Each time I recorded a song, I started with one instrument and then rewound the tape and recorded another instrument. So on and so forth until I’d recorded every part that was in my head.
I wrote and recorded 119 songs in the two years leading to my deal with Sony.
I still write that many songs, but there’s no way I have time to record that many these days. Which is strange because technology is meant to be faster right?
To give us more time. But somehow, with less limitations, I create less.
This is the heart of why I think Light Phone has arrived in my life at the perfect time. It’s helps to stop engaging with the containers of the message (apps), so we can fully engage with the message itself. It’s taken the smart out of the phone and put it back in the human, with the best of the past and the present of communications technology, to fuse it into a sustainable future-proof design, fit for the post-anxious generation.
Sound Pro Vs. Vision Pro
I haven’t used the words ‘big tech’ in this blog yet because if you’re a subscriber, you’ll know I basically sing for a living by critically (and humorously) calling out big tech.
In this blog I wanted to focus on The Rebel Alliance, not The Empire.
The heart of taking pervasive tech out of my pocket, was always the dream of making as much music as I write, again. Since there are so few eye-based functions on the Light Phone II, I am now hearing, listening and immersed in sound more than ever. I wanted to write this to share with my musician friends. We often talk about how tech is amazing, but also how it’s lost something valuable that we used to have.
I’m not ‘off-grid’. I am a fully paid up citizen of the Apple ecosystem. I make my albums, films and designs on my Mac. I listen to all my music on an iPod Classic, and since retiring my iPhone, I now have an iPad Mini (Wifi only) for tickets and other stuff when I have to engage with the ‘outside’ (which I hotspot from my Light Phone).
I actually think the Light Phone is a perfect companion to most Apple products. Especially Light Phone with iPad. These two compliment each other really well.
But any device that fits in your pocket and gives you anything, everything, all of the time, regardless of who you are or how old you are, is too powerful to resist.
It’s a bit like that scene at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark when everyone ends up melting. That’s kind of what happens when we play God. Knowing ‘everything’ is not the enchanting reward tech companies claim it to be . We need more space.
As Tom Waits says “We have a deficit of wonder in the world right now.”
Bringing Wonder Back
In 1995, I met the Grammy award winning director of The Beatles Anthology, Geoff Wonfor. I was 20, recently signed and still heavily under the spell of John Lennon. Geoff told me about a song that had been unearthed for the TV series, that Lennon had recorded alone in 1977, with the remaining Beatles recording their parts in 1995. The world wouldn’t hear the song until Christmas, but Geoff told me all about it on the night we met over drinks, after midnight in the heart of Soho. He said:
“The chorus of the song goes:
‘Free as a bird. It’s the next best thing to be.’
And there you have it, Lennon’s done it again!”
I said “What do you mean? What’s he done?”
Geoff leaned across the table and whispered conspiratorially “Well, being free as a bird is quite an aspiration isn’t it? But if it’s the ‘next’ best thing to be…then what the hell is the best thing to be? By not telling us, he is telling us there’s something better, but he’s left it out so that we can wonder for ourselves what the best thing might be. That’s interactive art. Lennon’s asking us to bring back…wonder”
The Light Phone doesn’t give you the answer. But with the absence of your pocket slot machine of infinite answers, it does bring back the wonder. Pablo Picasso said:
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
I’m willing to bet the solution could in part be found with the Light Phone.
If you’re Light-curious, check out our Step by Step Guide to Light Phone blog. And if you can’t live without a camera on your phone, they’ve just announced Light Phone III
Musician and Filmmaker Tim Arnold has researched screen addiction and social media’s effects on mental health since 2017, culminating in the critically acclaimed album, film and theatre show, Super Connected - Nihal Arthanayake, BBC 5 LIVE
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