School Requires iPhone or iPod for Students.

Last week Missouri University announced that either an iPod touch or an iPhone will be required for freshman in the School of Journalism. Don't worry, Steve Jobs isn't bribing the MU Bursar's office or flooding the faculty with sleeper agents. Students who fail to pick up either Apple device won't be punished.

“The reason we put required on it is to help the students on financial need,” said Brian Brooks, associate dean of the MU Journalism School. “If it’s required, it can be included in your financial need estimate. If we had not required it, they wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Even though i-Products themselves aren't a hard requirement for the program, it's clear that having a media recording and playing device of equivalent power is. You'd be hard-pressed to find a university student in this country who doesn't have either a netbook, laptop, cell phone, smartphone, or mp3 player of some sort. A lot of us have most or all of the above.

It's not just out of a juvenile need to have the shiniest new toys either. Being wired is good for your grade point average. If you've got a netbook and the right smartphone, you can get online and send in your assignments from almost anywhere. iPhones and a lot of mp3 players have voice recorders, which is good for both journalism students and kids who just want a way to review their lectures that doesn't involve a smudged, doodle-riddled notebook.

When they first came out iPods were cool extravagances for most of us. They were things you bought to entertain yourself, and not much else. Now the iPod (or an equivalent device) is a ubiquitous (some would say crucial) facet of daily life for millions of us. Smartphones are rapidly approaching that stage of market saturation, and netbooks won't be far behind.

The amount of technology we have to carry around with us in order to stay 'connected' with everyone else increases yearly. Only two things are saving us; the fact that tech size decreases at an equivalent rate, and increasing popularity of cargo pants.

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