The great British switch-off: how floating retreats, mobile-free pubs and sauna book groups are freeing people from their smartphones
A Hawaii reading retreat with the Silent Book Club. Photograph: Silent Book ClubView image in fullscreenA Hawaii reading retreat with the Silent Book Club. Photograph: Silent Book ClubSmartphonesThe great British switch-off: how floating retreats, mobile-free pubs and sauna book groups are liberating people from their phones Sick of doomscrolling?
- ▪A Hawaii reading retreat with the Silent Book Club.
- ▪Photograph: Silent Book ClubView image in fullscreenA Hawaii reading retreat with the Silent Book Club.
- ▪Photograph: Silent Book ClubSmartphonesThe great British switch-off: how floating retreats, mobile-free pubs and sauna book groups are liberating people from their phones Sick of doomscrolling?
The Guardian — Tech publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 62 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/01/great-british-switch-off-fun-freeing-ways-ditch-smartphone-doomscrolling |
| Publication time | Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:00:51 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-01T13:38:33.672Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-01T13:38:33.672Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | IATSbjrzVkiG · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A Hawaii reading retreat with the Silent Book Club. Photograph: Silent Book ClubView image in fullscreenA Hawaii reading retreat with the Silent Book Club. Photograph: Silent Book ClubSmartphonesThe great British switch-off: how floating retreats, mobile-free pubs and sauna book groups are liberating people from their phones Sick of doomscrolling? From venues with smartphone swear jars to cabins with absolutely no signal, here are the fun and freeing ways to ditch your deviceIsabelle AronSat 1 Aug 2026 07.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 1 Aug 2026 08.01 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleThere’s a ritual at the start of every event hosted by the Offline Project.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Tech.
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