Would I go in a drain for my iPhone? Hmm

It is rare, in our culture of airbrushed magazine covers and acutely calculated advertising, to come across an image so brutally honest it implores us to take a good look at ourselves. On Friday, just such a thing occurred. Suddenly and without warning, we were presented with a visual distillation of obsessive smartphone culture, a succinct comment on online addiction and brand idolatry which was at once gruesome and profound. Or maybe somebody just dropped a phone.
The image in question – as you can see – is of a 16-year-old girl firmly wedged in a roadside drain, her blonde hair falling in perfect ringlets down to the tarmac she's resting her elbows on. It's difficult to imagine a more enjoyable end of the week news story; a grinning VIZ cartoon come to life, which gets funnier as you find out more about it.
We learn that the girl, now named as Ella Birchenough, is laughing as two firemen struggle to hoist her out of the tiny rectangular drain; and that it was her mum who took and uploaded the picture; and, most brilliantly, that it was trying to reach her dropped iPhone with her toes that got her wedged in there in the first place.
How apt that such a remarkable effort to retrieve her connection to Twitter, Facebook and all the viral stories she simply couldn't afford to miss out on landed Ella belly-deep in her very own meme.
This sheer determination to reclaim her lost device and change her status to "online" once again saw her haul up a 3st drain cover in order to slither her body below ground. It's at once utterly stupid, impressively tenacious and, let's be honest, all too understandable for those of us who can't go five minutes without refreshing our emails because the automatic check every 15 minutes just isn't frequent enough.
A compulsion to engage constantly with new information affects more than just the Snapchatting 16-year-olds of the world. I'm in my mid-20s and I'm absolutely guilty of scrolling thoughtlessly through streams of Instagram, Twitter and image-sharing sites such as Imgur just to make sure I'm "up to date". Being disconnected from our online routines and communities is something an increasing number of people would find incredibly difficult.
"What could possibly possess a person to lodge themselves into a drain for an iPhone?" the world guffaws, as we all unconsciously click "share" and send the picture to everyone we know. So many of us are in thrall to the little screens in our pockets, obsessed with the idea that we might miss out on some Very Important Global Joke. So what happens at the prospect of losing our grip on it all? Well, common sense is the first thing to hoist itself gently down the drain, followed closely by Ella Birchenough. Then it's our turn.