In Phillip Pullman’s wonderful His Dark Materials novels, each character has a personal familiar or daemon, a constant companion with whom they can converse and who reflects the truth of their inner identity. In these novels each daemon is an animal: a monkey, a bird, a rat, each with its own characteristic qualities of temperament and movement. Someone’s daemon is a window into his or her soul.

Sadly we don’t live in Pullman’s beautiful and terrifying vision, and instead have to make do with mobile phones. The comparison might seem absurd until you start to look at the way we behave around our phones and, to a lesser extent, the other portable digital tools that we lug around with us.

My own phone, a perfectly decent little HTC running Windows Mobile 5.0, gives me more computing power in my hand than my father had access to during his entire career as an engineer building oil refineries (he used a slide rule instead). Like a daemon, it contains within it the essence of my working identity. It uses Microsoft ActiveSync to keep a mirror image of my e-mail, calendar, and contacts in my hand, and has a decent QWERTY keyboard which means it’s perfectly possible to craft a legible reply to short messages. It also lets me access my personal Gmail account, and of course supports text messages. Why, you can even use it to make phone calls.

I’ve got a cute little instant messaging program called Agile Messenger, which allows me to log on to my Yahoo! Instant Messenger account and quickly chat to a colleague online. For some reason there’s something hugely satisfying in doing this from a bus stop, as though you’re bending the laws of space and time by being simultaneously outside on the move and online.

I spend a lot of time on the train commuting and this gives me a chance to catch up on all the websites I need to read, via a very good RSS news reader for Windows Mobile called NewsBreak. My feeds are updated automatically via the phone networks so I can straphang on the Northern Line with one hand while reading Boing Boing with the other, another curiously satisfying activity – my phone is so much easier to read from than a newspaper. But of course, that’s just work: I’ve also got some music for those days when I forget my iPod, and pictures of my family to inflict on any old friends I run into. And there’s Google Maps for when I get lost.

My phone, like my daemon, is always with me. I always instinctively know where it is. As far as I can remember I’ve never lost a phone – it would be like losing the shoes I was wearing. That of course simply reflects my nature, just as it is a reflection on the nature of a scatty friend of ours that she returns three times after leaving the house: the first time for her car keys, the second time for her cigarettes, and the third time for her phone.

A daemon is always there, curled up on a shoulder, purring on a lap, or prowling the window ledge – just like a mobile. If you go into clubs or cafes now the mobile phone is displayed proudly on the table next to people’s cappuccinos or pints, ripe pickings for skilled thieves who conceal them beneath signs bearing begging requests written in broken English before stealthing them away. And of course that theft is monstrous, a violation. Not only are you suddenly unavailable, but you’ve lost all of your friends’ phone numbers, which probably don’t exist in your life in any written form. You have lost your place in the social, mobile web, and have to limp around, phoning people standing beside you to capture their number in your phone again and start the whole miserable business all over again.

The way phones are marketed in this country means that people have been able to indulge in using their phone as a form of self-expression. The handset is perceived as free, it gets upgraded every twelve months, so it becomes a fashion item: this year’s model, with a design, a look, a slim waistline, that we can use to reflect how we feel about ourselves. On CNET.co.uk we’ve discovered an almost limitless appetite for pictures of new mobile phones: people will click and click and click again, as though consuming pornography. What restless desire are they trying to fulfil? I think they’re looking for their next daemon, the next constant companion that will reflect who they think they are. Phones aren’t what they used to be.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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