Let me make an admission: I am a lukewarm technophile. When it comes to RAM, ROM, upgrades, chipsets, legacy compatibility, megapixels or talk-time, I’m a late-adopter. A slow-uptaker.

My initial impulse towards the first phase of mobile phones — those early bulbous bricks from the 1980s with such antiquities as aerial prongs and actual plastic buttons — was amusement. When the ‘second generation’ digital cellular systems emerged I saw friends take them up and integrate them into their social lives. I saw their pockets bulging uncomfortably and heard their ringtones pinging embarrassingly. The integration was beginning.

For me the very connectedness was the drawback. Of course, back then it wasn’t called connectedness — the elation around networks was yet to come — but was instead recommended for the convenience. It was convenient to tell you mom that you were going to be late for dinner, or let your friends know that you’d caught the bus and were on your way to meet them. The effect, in my eyes, was prosaic: to possess one of these message-tinklers was to bind yourself to the lusterless responsibility of keeping others informed, and to consequently worry about battery life and signal loss lest a message fail to make it’s required journey. But that was just me, high in my pen-and-ink tower, and, alas, never the heart and soul of a party.

Later incarnations in the form of smartphones are, of course, more fantastic and much harder to turn down. I finally bought my first phone a good decade after everyone else, and now swipe and tap and scroll with the best of them. The slew of social media platforms and the apps that support them, so giving rise to the profound reworking of distance and community into a new type of agency, is intriguing even to the most ashen-faced Luddite. The fact that photos and videos can spool across continents in a matter of seconds, proliferating conversations between individuals who will never meet in person, is a remarkable and profound innovation.

Moreover, the life force of a smartphone can give the impression of something magical. The glowing screen, pulsing ribbons of light, the élan vital of this little rectangle of plastic and glass is spectral and, for some at least, no less than spellbinding. Out of electrical impulses fired around tiny circuit boards, overlayed with framework upon framework of dense computer code, comes a pixel-precise organism that speaks and listens, sings and plays, and travels with us wherever we go. An organism that we may even come to love. Certainly few of us can live without it.

Each new generation of smartphone is slicker, cleverer and more integrated than the last. I have begun to toy with mine as instructor and mentor — telling me when to wake, sleep, eat, run, meditate. Perhaps soon I will rely on it in yet more profound ways: to supplement my intelligence, to administer medication, to regulate my moods. I will delegate more and more, and believe I am doing the right thing.

The process is made more mysterious because, as custodians of our smartphones, we feel rather removed from its internal marrow. We are aware of the finely balanced logic and programmatic syntax that is fizzing away underneath, but being so tightly sealed inside tamper-proof casing, exactly how the spark of life occurs, how it invigorates from bytes to bright lights, may seem darkly obscure. Truly, most of us have no idea what lies behind the inner animus of these amazing devices.