The photograph is unremarkable: two schoolgirls sitting on a trunk, a telephone between them, planning a weekend outing.
I am one of them.
What catches my eye is the phone itself. My sister and I made one call, settled on a plan and hung up. No messages flying back and forth. No notifications. No screenshots to be shared.
For anyone raised on smartphones, that kind of communication can seem almost prehistoric. Yet the landline has been turning up in unexpected places lately.
In the 2026 television series Love Story, the household telephone is more than a nostalgic prop. It represents something many people feel they have lost: anticipation, private conversations and the experience of being fully present with another person.
The nostalgia is easy to understand. More surprising is that the landline's return may have as much to do with the future as the past.
More than nostalgia
I have watched communication change dramatically over the past few decades. Smartphones replaced home phones. Messaging replaced conversation. The world became mobile, instant and permanently connected.
But the weaknesses of digital networks are becoming harder to ignore. Mobile service cuts can leave millions disconnected. Natural disasters can knock out networks when they are needed most. Cyber attacks increasingly focus on critical infrastructure.
A UN report, When Digital Systems Fail, warns that as societies become more dependent on digital technologies, disruptions can “cascade across systems and borders, triggering far-reaching and potentially catastrophic failures”.
Countries such as Japan build redundancy into communication systems. During the war in Ukraine, maintaining communication channels became a matter of resilience. Governments, militaries and emergency services around the world continue to rely on systems kept separate from the internet. Across the Gulf, airports, hospitals, transport networks and utilities maintain back-up communications for the same reason.
Against that backdrop, the landline starts to look less like a relic and more like a contingency plan.
The appeal of analogue
The decline of the landline has been dramatic. In the US, more than 90 per cent of households had one in 2004. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 29 per cent.
Yet some people are beginning to value precisely what once made the technology seem outdated.
“The utility of the landline is now defined by all the things it's not,” says David Sax, author of The Revenge of Analog. “It's basically not a mobile phone or something tied to the internet.”
Sax argues that analogue technologies endure because they offer something digital alternatives cannot.
“When things become digital, there's a sense of inevitability,” he says. “But eventually, the difference and deeper value of the analogue version appears in contrast.”
The same pattern can be seen in the revival of vinyl records, film photography and paper notebooks. People are being drawn back to the limits that once pushed them away.
“Landlines are just one example,” Sax says. “They're slower, they're limited, they're less complicated and contained.”
Contained is the key word.
Because a smartphone is never just a phone. “Each and every call comes with many distractions: social media feeds, emails, videos and advertisements,” says Janavi Iyer, programming director at a radio station in Mumbai.
A landline, by contrast, simply connects two people.
The parenting experiment
That simplicity appeals to a growing number of parents.
Concerns about children's screen time have grown in recent years, particularly after social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation was released in 2024. In the book, Haidt concludes that rising levels of anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal continue to dog a generation raised on smartphones and social media.
Not everyone agrees with his conclusions. Even as researchers debate how much of the problem is due to smartphones, there seems to be broad agreement that excessive screen time, poor sleep and compulsive social media use deserve closer attention.
Parents have responded in different ways. Some support initiatives such as Wait Until 8th, which encourages families to delay smartphone ownership. Others have turned to flip phones, smartwatches and, increasingly, landlines.
In Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Britain and North America, some families are bringing communication back into shared spaces.
A UK House of Commons Committee report found a 52 per cent increase in children's screen time between 2020 and 2022, and said that nearly a quarter of children and young people use their smartphones “in a way consistent with behavioural addiction”.
As parents look for alternatives, companies are marketing landlines as a practical substitute for smartphones.
One of the best known is Tin Can, a US company that sells landline-style phones designed for children. Its slogan, “All Talk, No Smarts”, captures the appeal. Others include Community Phone and Voiply.
Lena Dwight, a working mother in Mobile, Alabama, says she and her husband wanted their children “to be able to call friends without carrying the internet around in their pockets”.
The results surprised her. “My children talk more. They speak to grandparents more. They have learnt how to start and end conversations.”
There are lighter benefits too. “Nobody knows who it is when the phone rings. There's something strangely exciting about that.”
Learning to talk again
Psychologists see much value in these changes.
Dr Vandana Kulkarni, a Pune-based clinical psychologist who works with adolescents, says phone conversations can help to cultivate social skills that text-based communication can’t.
“Empathy, real-time communication, reading tone of voice, knowing when to talk more and when to pull back – these are all skills developed through conversation,” she says.
“They're important skills, and increasingly we're seeing young adults who have had fewer opportunities to practise them.”
There is another aspect to the discussion: privacy.
Many adults who grew up with landlines remember conversations taking place in hallways or kitchens. Parents often knew who had called and siblings overheard discussions.
Smartphones changed that dynamic. Friendships, relationships, and social lives can now progress without the rest of the household knowing.
Yet younger users are also discovering a different kind of privacy in analogue communication. A phone call is over when it ends; it is not archived, searchable, forwarded or screen-grabbed.
At a time when nearly every interaction leaves a digital trace, that feels unusual.
“It's quaint to talk on the landline. I won't be giving up my mobile phone but I enjoy this natural boundary for some calls,” says Ray Dwight, Lena's son, a Grade 8 pupil.
A boundary against the screen
The appeal is no longer limited to parents.
Sophie Carter, 22, a marketing executive from Canterbury in the UK, says her daily phone use routinely exceeded eight hours before she bought a landline-style device for her apartment.
“I'd pick up my phone to call my mum and then would find that I had spent 40 minutes scrolling – on what, I couldn’t really say,” she says.
The scale of digital immersion is hard to ignore. A third of teenagers now say they are on at least one major social media platform “almost constantly”.
For Carter, the dedicated phone created a boundary. “I think of it as a physical boundary that helps me protect my digital boundaries. If I want to speak to someone, I use the phone. Then I'm done.”
Her experience reflects a broader revival of analogue technology among younger consumers. Part of the attraction is aesthetic; part is nostalgia for an era they never experienced.
As cultural critic Simon Reynolds observed in his book, Retromania, modern society has unprecedented access to its own recent past. We can endlessly revisit, revive and recycle cultural artefacts from previous decades.
The landline fits neatly into that story.
The case for a back-up plan
There is also a practical question beneath the nostalgia. As climate disasters, cyber attacks and network failures become more common, could households start viewing landlines the way they view back-up generators?
The answer depends on the technology.
“Many modern landline services now run through internet connections and share some of the same vulnerabilities as digital networks,” says Aniruddha Dutta, a telecommunications analyst in Ahmedabad, India. “But the principle remains the same: resilience comes from having alternatives.”
Smartphones are not going anywhere. They are too useful and too deeply woven into everyday life.
“But the renewed interest in landlines suggests that many people are looking for something digital technology often fails to provide: focus, privacy, and a reliable fallback,” Kulkarni says.
Once an ordinary fixture in every home, the landline has become an intentional choice. And, in a world of constant notifications and round-the-clock reachability, the sound of a phone ringing in the hallway doesn't sound bad at all.
