I recently lost my mobile phone. It’s the first time I’ve ever lost my phone. I haven’t replaced it yet, because I’m intending to get an iPhone when it comes out next month. Losing my phone made me realise how accustomed I am to having it with me. Payphone boxes are useless to me: I don’t know most useful numbers. My mobile phone memorized phone numbers for me, so I never had to.

I feel vulnerable without my mobile phone. If I planned to meet a friend, and something came up, I could re-plan the meeting using my phone. Organizing, re-organizing meetings on the move is really useful. Without a phone on me, I’ve had to fall back on careful planning before I leave the house.

My dependence on my phone reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s fictional creation, Molloy, who is so dilapidated that he can’t move without the aid of a bicycle. Physical dilapidation the least of his problems. He can’t remember his name, if his mother is really his mother, or if his bicycle is really his bicycle. His dependence on technology to move around led the critic Hugh Kenner to describe Molloy as a Cartesian centaur: half man, half bicycle.

(When Molloy loses his bicycle later in the novel, he uses his crutch as a grapnel to crawl through a forest on his belly: again, he is reliant on tools.)

We have grown so dependent on our phones that we notice how helpless and incapacitated we feel when, say, the battery runs out, or we lose them. The mobile phone is an extension of our bodies. Like Molloy, we are Cartesian centaurs: the technological component makes up half of ourselves.

The mobile phone is different from most media because it is so personal. They are digital approximations of identity. The address book is a digital approximation of the people we know. It is highly personal: the handset we choose conveys personality, status, wealth, and taste; we can customise theme, wallpaper, fonts. Most important to us is that it helps us connect with the world.

Like Molloy who depends on his bicycle in order to move around, we depend on our phones to help us feel connected to the world.