A gentle chiming of bells wakes me with the same aura of companionship, as always..

“Good morning, my iPhone,” I say, quite contentedly. “It’s so good to see you.”

And he agrees, lighting up my shuttered room with news of the outside: Culture! Music! Disaster! And I need not even sit up.

“iPhone 4, you are everything that I need.”

And so much more.

You see, I’m a man who’s known a phone or two. From my over-hyped excitement of the long-abandoned Windows Mobile platform, the unbeatable awesome of Android on an HTC phone and the deep, soulful bond accompanying the iOS, I’m someone who can never go back to that bare-bones, pay-as-you-go Tracfone.

Since the early days of my middle school career, I’ve sought out increasingly intelligent telephones to shorten the gap between the mental capacity of my phone and myself. So far, I’ve been doing pretty well.

As a journalist, the need to be connected is an ever-growing urge that leaves me checking Twitter feeds constantly, updating my Facebook news, refreshing email and sending/receiving SMS messages all day long. If I wasn’t connected at every moment, the system would break down.

Take, for example, my Editor in Chief, who, when news breaks, will immediately email, instant message, text, tweet or otherwise message in my direction. Now, with my iPhone, I have no excuse not to respond. I’m on it, in a moment’s notice, with tweets tweeted and calls made, all while looking up background on Wikipedia.

But I wonder: what if my phone hearkened back to the days of yore, when a phone was meant to call and be called, and nothing else. Judging by my last phone bill and the accompanying figures of sent and received text messages and data usage, it’s clear that voice calling has become a bit of a peripheral function, slightly behind my European-developed, orinthology-inspired games.

As a student, it’s difficult for me to justify my obsession with the connectivity my phone webs me in with. It’s a rare day that I feel it enhances class in the same way my professors would agree, but, hey, this is the modern world we’re living in. Don’t try and fight it.

_Nathaniel is a sophomore in Media. Follow him on Twitter @Nat_Lash._