I was intrigued to find out how this would work but a bit freaked out too. I use my iPhone non-stop: four hours each day during school terms; eight during holidays. Snapchat matters most, but I’m often following friends on TikTok and Instagram.
The prospect of not having access to any apps or the internet was just “ugh”. Part of me wanted to scream at the thought of being cut off by this Sage phone. Would it make me want to divorce my parents?
I knew I was going to miss out. The Sage phone came loaded only with Google Maps, Spotify, Monzo, Uber, a calendar and the TfL Go transport app. None of that gave me much to do. There was messaging, but no one really uses messages and I can’t remember the last time I made a phone call to a friend.
Let’s start with the positives. Because the phone was so boring, I didn’t want to use it, [I] put it down and chatted more with my family. I spent less time in my room and was more productive – I even wrote this piece!
The people at Sage said it could take a month to get used to the limitations, but I don’t have that long to test it. I can already tell you that if you are a teenager you are going to feel disconnected from all of your friends and the rest of the world and that feels unfair. Having TikTok and Instagram is the way the world is wired now. If you take them away then it’s quite hard to stay in the loop.
If I stayed with this phone I would also end up feeling left out when speaking in real life to my friends as this is where so many of our sayings and jokes come from.
Social media is the way we know what everyone is up to and without it I felt I would be left out of the goings-on. We know social media is distracting, but it’s important to our social world now. During GCSEs some of my friends deleted apps, but they all ended up redownloading them within two days.
I’m not as worried about the harms as many adults are. I made some of my closest friends through playing Roblox during the Covid lockdown and that’s not allowed on this phone. I wasn’t addicted to it. It was just fun. I have lots of friends from other schools who I might not text or talk to for weeks at a time, but through Snap I can stay in contact with them, see what they are up to and exchange things like videos that keep our relationships going in a way that wouldn’t happen with just phones. It has become a social glue and without it our networks might fall apart.
It’s true that there are people who are negatively affected by exposure to TikTok accounts promoting a particular image of beauty. So this limited phone could prevent that and reduce the risk of people struggling with body image.
And if your parents insist on you having a “dumb” phone, I think this could be an effective way to eliminate the shame of having a “brick” phone. If you were out with your friends and people were checking their phones it would be really weird to pull out a Nokia or not get a phone out.
Overall, I understand the intentions and the appeal to parents, but unless everyone switched to Sage, I would miss out on too much.
