For Damien Douani, an expert on new technologies at FaDa agency, it is simply trendy now to be using the retro phone….There is also ‘a logic of counter-culture in reaction to the over-connectedness of today's society, with disconnection being the current trend.’

In The Secret Horse her teenage heroine, Abby, lives on a ranch in California where her father buys and sells horses. The novels are set in the 1960s, partly, Smiley says, because she didn't want the overconnectedness of today's mobile phone and Facebook generation but also because she wanted to explore the moment in American equestrian history when traditional horse-breaking methods were challenged by a new style of training known in the US as natural horsemanship.

This Israeli motorist with a cell phone in each ear, driving with his elbows, gets my vote as the poster boy for the social disease of the next millennium — overconnectedness. This is the real Y2K virus for developed countries. It is the anxiety that is going to be produced when telecommunications combines with the "Evernet" — the technology that will soon allow people to get on line from their watches, their cars, their toasters or their Walkmans — so that everyone will be able to be connected all the time, everywhere.