Revisiting the ‘Snug Tether’

More than any other media interface in our everyday lives, smartphones have been designed to be with us at all times. We carry them around in domestic spaces, check that we have them before leaving the house, and rely routinely on their networked and communicative capacities. In doing so, we handle them in personalised, habitual ways (Hardley, Mobile 4). Their absence can register as discomfort, and we notice when we have left them at home, or they have been misplaced in domestic or public spaces. Yet occasionally we choose this absence deliberately, turning phones off, switching to flight mode, or leaving the house without them, and people often speak of these moments in terms of freedom or liberation. Our collective and individual relationship to smartphones was reworked during COVID-19 lockdowns (Hardley and Richardson, Digital 630), but even so, the smartphone has remained close to the body, snugly tethered to our everyday movements. Twenty years ago, Ito's groundbreaking research into Japanese mobile phone culture described these devices as offering a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life. (Ito 1) This article revisits Ito's concept of the snug tether, considering how the concept, and the practices it describes, are shifting in an era increasingly marked by distancing from our devices. Here, distancing refers to the deliberate or incidental practices, gestures, and artefacts through which users create physical space between themselves and their smartphones, even as the device remains nearby. Beginning with touchscreen design, which renders the smartphone something close to an extension of the hand, the article then turns to three distinct instances of being distanced from, or without, a smartphone: An example drawn from my longitudinal ethnographic and haptic research with Australian smartphone users, exploring what it feels like to hold, and to be without, a smartphone. "Reading raves" in Amsterdam, which invite participants to trade the morning scroll for group reading on a museum rooftop. The use of distancing strategies and artefacts, such as landline-style accessories. This article concludes by considering these practices in the larger cultural landscape of smartphone bans in Australian schools. The Evolutionary ‘Fit’ of Touchy-Feely Smartphone Design The functionalities of early mobile phones radically reworked freedom and mobility for many people; however, these non-networked mobile phones were limited in what they could offer. The transition from non-networked mobile phones was revolutionised in 2007 with the release of the first iPhone, and the subsequent opening of the App Store in 2008. The first iPhone was a Web-enabled device with a touchscreen, allowing the user to access the Internet with increased mobility, use locative functionalities, haptically engage with the touchscreen, and be part of networked modes of interaction (Richardson 134). It was with the release of the first iPhone that offline and online first converged into a hybrid digital and physical and social layering (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 56), allowing users to enhance their interaction with people and physical space through the touchscreens, apps, and networked capacities (Frith 76). As noted by Mitchell, Foth, and Anastasiu, “a large part of what makes a smartphone 'smart' are its built-in location-based services: its ability to locate and be located” (183). Alongside these geo-locative functionalities, smartphone touchscreens lent themselves to a deep haptic engagement between users and devices. As described by Richardson, the iPhone is specifically created for use with the finger or fingers for multi-touch sensing, and because the screen is a capacitive touchscreen, it depends on electrical conductivity that can only be provided by bare skin. (144) What can be referred to as “touchy-feely” (Paterson 152) renders the smartphone an extension of the human hand. Touch and the heightened presence of others are offered through the touchscreen where users co-ordinate hand and finger gestures to tap, swipe, and pinch on profiles, photos, and personal information (Hardley, Mobile 44; Richardson and Wilken 109). In this way, haptic mobile media have changed the way we understand and experience the relationship between intimacy, proximity and touch. (Hjorth and Richardson 33) Smartphones are seamlessly gripped, held, cradled, and touched by the hand. The buttons of early-generation mobile phones that would "stick out" (Plotnick 1647) have been replaced with an interface of slickness, swipes, touches, and taps, resulting in a seamless integration of the device into the human hand. We are well and truly in the "touchscreen moment" (Hjorth, Burgess, and Richardson 1), and a "haptic moment" (Parisi, Paterson, and Archer 1514), where the boundaries between device and body have become diluted. Yet, we are also in the infancy of gimmicky artefacts that act to distance the human hand from the device. Additionally, within the Australian context, we are facing regulatory change considered by Professor Sefton-Green as "an extraordinary test case" (Deakin University par. 6). Until recently, the tethering between human hand and device became so complete that the device was rarely in a different location to the body. The following three examples—from my ethnographic and haptic research, offline gatherings, and gimmicky landline accessories—highlight a reworking of the snug tether characterising much mobile phone use until relatively recently. They consider what happens when the smartphone tethering is re-worked, deliberately or otherwise. Haptic Experiments and Composite Vignettes Over the last decade, I have engaged in longitudinal qualitative studies of Australian smartphone users, with over 100 participants. These studies involved home-visit interviews, online interviews, haptic experiments, app walk-throughs, and GPS tracking, exploring how mobile media are incorporated into everyday embodied experiences. One distinct thread of my research has considered what it feels like to hold a smartphone in the hand—not to use it, per se, but to hold it. Haptic experiments during home-visits have allowed in situ insights into lived experiences of embodied knowledge, proximity, intimacy, and technologies of touch. In one experiment I asked each participant to hold their smartphone in their hand, after which I asked them to describe what their device means to them and how it makes them feel. Participants' responses ranged from holding their phone face-up or face-down in the palm of their hand, rotating their wrist so their phone could be viewed from every angle, stroking the screen of their device affectionately, and closing their eyes and clutching their phone to their chest. Verbal responses included "I'd be lost without it", "it's my world", "it's my connection to everything", through to enthusiastic exclamations of "I love my phone!" and "it's such an unnecessary burden". What these responses revealed was not brand loyalty or an unquestioned digital dependence, but something primordial. How we handle the mobile interface is personal and intimate (Hardley and Richardson, Embodied 101). Smartphones have become so mundane in everyday life that many users hold or cradle their device without giving it much thought. In what follows, I present one composite vignette, a method inspired by Markham (344), Berry (18), and Pink (185), to offer an atmospheric interpretation and description that serves to illuminate one key emergent theme from my research (Hardley, Mobile 99). Reaching for a Device That Isn’t There This vignette of 'Ravi' represents someone in their early twenties living in a share house in a large Australian city, who enjoys socialising with his friends, making a decent wage, and possessing some university education. Ravi illustrates the hand-device intimacy through the felt experience of being without a smartphone. Ravi is halfway to work on a Saturday morning when he realises his smartphone is at home. He pauses on the footpath, sensing an absence before realising the left pocket of his jeans isn't holding the weight and shape of his phone. He decides not to turn back, because he wants to prove to himself that he isn't dependent on his phone. The day feels longer than usual for Ravi. Throughout the day his hand moves to his pocket without thinking. Reaching for the scroll, the swipe, the loop of social media feeds—but he finds he has nothing to reach for. The gesture of reaching to his pocket continues anyway, muscle memory taking precedence over material reality. He experiences the absence as a kind of irritation, like an itch he cannot quite scratch. Ravi does not know what his friends are sending to each other in the group chat, whether the person he's recently started dating has messaged him back, or whether anyone has noticed he has gone quiet. He is not only without the device in his hand; he is, for the day, unreachable within his network. As for many, Ravi's smartphone is held and handled in personal, intimate, and habitual ways which inform his being-in-the-world. Smartphones are designed to "fit nicely" (Wellner 27) to the human body, with an increasingly wide range of sizes and weights that makes the devices easier to be used without physical strain. The “fit” between hand and device described by Cooley (143), and experienced by those represented by Ravi, is so deeply embedded into everyday life that the thumb finds the screen's lower edge without looking, and the fingers curl around the case with a grip that is neither tight nor loose but simply right. This "mutual contouring" (Cooley 145) extends beyond the physical shape of hand and device into the relational, whereby Ravi's smartphone is not merely an object to be held, but also a primary way of remaining connected with people in his life from