ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the flip phone as a specific form of cell phone, a subset of the larger category with a particularly compressed and charged history. Pop singer Adele’s use of a flip phone in the video for her blockbuster 2015 single “Hello” offers a different cultural figuration of the flip phone as a device of the past. Yet the most notable old technology is the 2000s-era flip phone that Adele uses at the opening of the video, placing a failed call that seems to prefigure and frame the song’s telephonic lyrics, epitomized in its chorus “Hello from the other side/ I must have called a thousand times”. The chapter examines Motorola’s MicroTAC and StarTAC models as paradigmatic examples of the high point of the flip phone’s market and cultural dominance and considers several moments in the history of the digital that illustrate an undead return of the flip phone.
