Nomophobia

As if the world doesn't have enough neurotic disorders already (for me it all ended when I found out you can have a morbid fear of cheese - Turophobia) I discovered that the latest neurosis is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact - Nomophobia.  I was reading Philip Roth's novel Exit Ghost on the Tube home and through serendipity stumbled across this passage which summed up the question of how the world got so obsessed with mobile telephony and always being available.

"What had happened in these ten years for there to be suddenly so much to say - so much pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers where on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone ..... I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferrable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarilly solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous ....... What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient - impatient and angry like a little stupid god."