Researcher tests life without a smartphone

Society is increasingly grappling with a growing dependence on the smartphones many of us carry with us every waking moment of our lives. It has led some to forgo them altogether. One of those people is Dr Alex Beattie, a Senior Lecturer in Information Management at Victoria University, whose research focuses on how society lives with, and disconnects from, digital technologies. He is half a year into his own experiment in living without a smartphone. Beattie spoke to John Campbell via his so-called dumbphone.