Revisiting the ‘Snug Tether’

Smartphones in an Era of Scroll-Free Social Events, Landline Accessories, and Device Bans

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:

1. 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.
2. "Reading raves" in Amsterdam, which invite participants to trade the morning scroll for group reading on a museum rooftop.
3. 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 a distance.

Ravi's itch is one of accidental un-tethering—his hand still reaching for what it has learnt to expect, and a network still assumed to be holding him even as he has fallen out of its view. The sections that follow contrast this habituated mode of being-in-the-world with the rise of phone jails, smartphone bans in schools, and disconnect to reconnect strategies (Vanluydt et al. 551).

“Reading Rave”

Where Ravi's vignette captures an accidental un-tethering where his device was absent, but he kept reaching for it throughout the day, the emergent “1-Hour Reading Rave” events staged by Amsterdam's "Offline Club" propose a different kind of device disruption (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Image from The Offline Club Website.

For these events, the device can remain on or near the body but is rendered deliberately unused and out of sight. Participants are asked to arrive with their phones "off and tucked away for the entire hangout" (The Offline Club). The smartphone is not left at home, as with Ravi, but carried into the space and then out of sight (fig. 2). While still present in a bag or pocket, its haptic and networked capacities are suspended rather than removed.

Fig. 2: Image from The Offline Club Website.

This distinction is useful for reconsidering the concept of the snug tether. My longitudinal research with Australian smartphone users repeatedly surfaced a habitual “mindless” handheld interaction. Many participants described scrolling through Facebook on the train to “avoid looking like a creep who is just doing nothing", glancing at their screens in a shared workplace kitchen to sidestep small talk with colleagues, or playing mobile games such as Candy Crush to procrastinate on a task at home or work (Hardley, Mobile 96).

These behaviours suggest the tether is not only, or even primarily, about connectivity (e.g. receiving messages, checking notifications) but about a device-mediated buffer against unwanted social proximity. Like earlier mobile media such as the Sony Walkman (Bull, Sounding 44; Bull, Sound 2), the smartphone offers many users a legitimate, gestural reason not to make eye contact, not to speak, and not to be idle in front of others. Another participant referred to her smartphone and over-ear wireless headphones as “the sign of my generation that I don’t want to be disturbed” (Hardley, Mobile 41).

What the reading rave stages, then, is not the absence of the tether but its suspension. In doing so, the physical intimacy persists in the pocket even as the relational intimacy of use is temporarily immobilised. Paradoxically, these events require online registration, booking via a Web browser and app. What can be observed is a blending of pre-mobile practices where “landmarks and times were the points that coordinated action and convergence in urban space” (Ito and Obake 266), and a temporarily modified snug tether of attendees.

Distancing Accessories to Render Smartphones Less Mobile

One of my participants spoke about locking her smartphone in a drawer at work because she had become so absorbed in progressing levels in Candy Crush, which she described as “obsessive”. She expressed concern about getting into trouble for gaming during work hours and recalled needing a physical and visual separation from her smartphone to focus on her work tasks.

This participant shared her story with me before the rise of gimmicky artefacts such as the "Handheld Retro Wired Telephone Handset with Microphone for Smartphones" (fig. 3). With old-school landlines making a cultural comeback (Stevens), the snug and seamless tether coined by Ito and practiced by most smartphone users is being interrupted, with an apparent desire to remain close to, but distanced from, smartphones.

Fig. 3: A retro-style wired handset with a Type-C connector, designed to attach to a smartphone for a nostalgic, corded-phone calling experience.

Simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, many smartphone users are currently expending considerable effort trying to disrupt the snug tether. Self-imposed strategies, such as greyscale settings, app timers, do not disturb schedules, and phones left deliberately in another room are emerging alongside more formalised, institutional interventions such as banning smartphones in schools. "Phone jails" (fig. 4), lockable pouches distributed at concerts (Sisson and Whalen 514), and smartphone bans at schools (Anderson 3; Robards et al. 493) increasingly work to de-couple the body-device seamless integration.

Fig. 4: The "Mobile Phone Jail Cell Lock-Up Locking Box", a novelty timer-based device marketed for restricting phone access, holding up to six devices.

Where Ravi's de-tethering was accidental, and the reading rave's is collective and scheduled, the distancing artefacts in this section offer a more deliberate variation to the snug tether. The participant who locks her smartphone in a drawer is deliberately attempting to disrupt a device-hand habit that she deemed risky in the workplace. It signals a physical break in the loop of touch and response that the smartphone was designed to perform.

Alongside these accessories, companies such as Coilie are capitalising on this cultural moment of making mobile media less mobile. Coilie (fig. 5) is a wall-mounted dock with a coiled cord that holds the phone itself, rather than a handset attachment, marketed on social media with posts claiming as "we simply gave the phone an intentional home" (Coilie).

Fig. 5: Screenshot of Coilie Instagram reel.

Coilie boldly leans into the pseudo-neuroscientific marketing language of "rewire your brain” and “give your phone a home, your mind a rest, and your nervous system a reset”. The retro handset accessory attempts to remove the proximity of human hand and ear to the device. It resembles a corded and clunky object that has been described as a “cord-twirling comeback” (Stevens) relationship to telecommunication. In cradling this accessory, the user does not relinquish the experience of holding a device to the ear or in the hand, but there is a redirecting of attention away from the smartphone and towards the retro headset.

Phone jails and lockable pouches formalise this same impulse at an institutional scale, substituting self-discipline with hard containment. The device is neither at home, as with Ravi, nor merely switched off in a pocket, as at the reading rave, but rendered physically inaccessible to the hand that would otherwise reach for it. While the previous two examples disrupt the snug tether, these artefacts and interventions actively seek to sever it, if only temporarily.

Conclusion

This article began with Ito's observation that the mobile phone offers "a snug and intimate technosocial tethering" (Ito 1), alongside the fit of the smartphone in hand. As the discussion of touchscreen design highlighted, the device is engineered for a closeness to the human body and hand (Richardson and Wilken 121). It is seamlessly gripped, cradled, and touched, its slickness replacing the buttons that stick out of earlier mobile phone design. The three examples that followed each unsettle this mutual contouring.

Ravi's accidental un-tethering revealed how deeply the snug tether is embodied, with his hand continuing to reach for a device that was not there. The reading rave staged a collective and scheduled version of a disruption, suspending rather than removing the tether. The distancing accessories, from the retro handset to Coilie's wall-mounted dock, attempt to interrupt the constant handling of the smartphone in domestic spaces.

School smartphone bans, now legislated in various Australian states and elsewhere, extend this same logic from the individual body to an entire regulated population, and from the domestic to the institutional: rather than a device an individual chooses to set aside, it is a separation insisted upon for the entirety of the school day. It is likely no coincidence that stationary landline accessories such as the phone jail are being marketed in the same cultural moment (Stevens); the impulse Coilie sells to individual consumers is, in schools, formalised as policy.

We are, then, still well and truly in the touchscreen moment and the haptic moment, where the boundaries between device and body remain diluted for most everyday use. But alongside it, this article has traced the infancy of a different cultural moment altogether—from scroll-free community events to neuroscientifically-worded marketing of landline accessories, the snug tether is being called into question.

While Ravi's account was drawn from ethnographic and phenomenological research into smartphone use in Australia from 2016 to 2025, the phone jails and de-tethering tools this article discusses are emergent phenomena. As a society, we are at the precipice of new policies and practices, requiring further attention to how the smartphone is experienced, and how its presence and absence is both realised and resisted once policy and design intervene.

Ravi's muscle memory, reaching for an empty pocket, is a useful motif to end on, as it is a collective experience for many smartphone users. Whether that itch is felt the same way by every-body is a question this article has not tried to answer, nor can it. My larger body of research suggests it will not be, because if the smartphone has been incorporated differently (Hardley, Mobile 24; Hardley and Richardson, Embodied 91), its de-tethering is unlikely to be felt as either neutral or universal.

As with any tool, how and why we use, and are without, smartphones are shaped by age, gender, race, and disability (Salen Tekinbaş 35), a line of intersectional analysis I have pursued at greater length elsewhere (Hardley, Gender 65), and one that further work on de-tethering will need to sustain.

Future work might extend this inquiry to moments where the snug tether becomes a matter of physical safety rather than habit, such as Cumiskey and Hjorth's (418) research on mobile phone use during the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando Florida (USA) in 2016, and my own ongoing research into women’s and girls’ smartphone safety practices in public spaces in Australia. This raises further questions about what is gained and lost when policy asks users to unlearn and distance from the social and physical and digital layers that characterise smartphone design and use.

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