IT may be the most life-changing thing I’ve ever bought. Early this year I purchased an iPhone, a device considerably more advanced than any I’ve owned before.

I’ve never had the kind of instant internet access which the Apple provides.

When I wanted to go online in the years BI (Before iPhone) I had to sit at a desk, either at home or at work, and wait a few minutes for my computer to warm up. But now I can access the internet within seconds, anywhere I want.

I can check email, Facebook, Twitter, news sites or football scores when I’m on the train, out for a walk or wandering round Morrisons.

This is the great advantage of the iPhone – the internet is always with you. But it’s also the great disadvantage.

The iPhone is simultaneously the best and worst thing I’ve ever bought.

I’ve only had the device for nine months but I’ve already noticed my powers of concentration have dimmed because of the instant gratification it offers.

I’m not saying I had great people skills before I got my iPhone, but I could at least hold a conversation.

Now I have the concentration of a toddler. Within seconds of someone starting to talk to me my mind drifts off to the little black rectangle in my pocket.

Having an iPhone has also led to a sharp reduction in the number of books I read. Evenings once spent engrossed in weighty tomes are now frittered away flicking from one website to another.

I feel more informed than ever, but at the cost of becoming less knowledgeable.

The search for instant mental gratification seems to have speeded up my life considerably.

So perhaps it’s appropriate that I happened to purchase an iPhone in 2011, the year when the world appeared to accelerate with one extraordinary event following another.

The News God seems to have bought an iPhone this year. Where once He would have lingered over a great event for weeks, in 2011 even extraordinary occurrences bored Him within days, even hours.

Remember the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in March? In any other set of 12 months, this huge loss of life and potentially catastrophic radiation leak would have been the world event of the year. But in 2011 it struggled to hold the News God’s attention for more than a week.

Two months later came the death of Osama bin Laden, the man who had haunted the American Dream for a decade.

There were a few days of whooping and back-slapping and then poor old OBL was forgotten as the News God flicked on to the next big story.

By the time bin Laden met his death in his Pakistani hidey-hole, the al-Qaida leader had become almost an irrelevance because of the huge changes gripping the Middle East.

The Arab Spring is the story of the year – if for no other reason than it stretched throughout the 12 months.

The long-serving dictators of North Africa spent January 1, 2011 in their luxurious palaces in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

They will spend New Year’s Day 2012 respectively in exile, in a prison cell and 6ft under the desert.

The other story to which the News God has returned time and again this year was the slow-motion collapse of the euro. Several times in 2011 the currency appeared to be little more than a hefty shove from oblivion.

And the failing euro also provided the push for one of the most important events in Britain this year – when David Cameron walked away from an economic deal with the rest of the European Union earlier this month.

Not that there’s been a shortage of other news in Britain this year. The News God has flicked between riots, the AV referendum and huge public sector strikes.

The phone-hacking story held His attention for a few weeks in the summer and He has returned to it about once a week since.

But the biggest British political story of the year interested the News God for only a few days.

In May the Scottish National Party (SNP) won a majority of seats in the Edinburgh Parliament – the first time any group had achieved such support.

The implications for all of us are immense. This country which we live in – the so-called United Kingdom – is on life-support.

The SNP is determined to hold a referendum on Scottish independence in the next few years. With the unionist parties hopelessly divided and weak, there’s a fair chance Alex Salmond will triumph.

The chances of the United Kingdom splitting up within the next decade are creeping up towards 50%.

Instead of moving on to the next big story, the News God needs to put down His iPhone and think about this for a while.