I’ve had some great covers for my book (in several languages), but when I saw Marsel van Oosten’s fantastic photograph “Facebook Update,” I thought: That would make an awesome book cover.

After all, The Distraction Addiction opens with these words:

On the western edge of the ancient city of Kyoto, Japan, on the slope of Mount Arashiyama (literally “Stormy Mountain”), stands the Iwatayama Monkey Park. The park has winding paths and fine views of Kyoto, but the main attraction is the tribe of about a hundred and forty macaques who live there. The mon- keys of Iwatayama are famously gregarious, playful, and, occasionally, crafty. Like all members of the Macaca genus, they combine sociability and intelligence. They play with their kin, watch one another’s young, learn new skills from one another, and even have distinctive group habits.

Some develop a mania for bathing, snowball-making, washing food, fishing, or using seawater as a seasoning. [Or stealing iPhones!] Iwatayama macaques are known for flossing and for playing with stones. This has led some scientists to argue that macaques have a culture, something we’ve traditionally thought of as distinctly human. They’re also humanlike in their natural curiosity and cunning: one second, you’re watching one do something cute, and the next second, his friends are making off with the bag of food you bought at the park’s entrance [or your iPhone!].

They’re like humans in one other way. For all their smarts, nothing keeps their attention for very long. The mountainside gives them a fantastic view of one of the world’s most historic cities, but it doesn’t impress them. They keep up a constant chatter, a running monologue of inconsequence. The macaques are living examples of the Buddhist concept of the monkey mind, one of my favorite metaphors for the everyday, undisciplined, jittery mind. As Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa explains, the monkey mind is crazy: It “leaps about and never stays in one place. It is completely restless.”

The monkey mind’s constant activity reflects a deep restlessness: monkeys can’t sit still because their minds never stop. Likewise, most of the time, the human mind delivers up a constant stream of consciousness. Even in quiet moments, minds are prone to wandering [or stealing iPhones]. Add a constant buzz of electronics [from stolen iPhones], the flash of a new message landing in your in-box [on your stolen iPhones], the ping of voicemail [emanating from stolen iPhones], and your mind is as manic as a monkey after a triple espresso. The monkey mind is attracted to today’s infinite and ever-changing buffet of information choices and devices [especially stolen iPhones]. It thrives on overload, is drawn to shiny and blinky [and stolen] things, and doesn’t distinguish between good and bad [stolen] technologies or choices.

Of course, this is a snow monkey in Nagano rather than Kyoto, but still, the picture captures the monkey mind’s fascination with technology as well as any image I can imagine. Though I must admit, that monkey looks pretty focused on the phone.

Van Oosten explains how he got the picture:

Earlier this year, we hosted two of our annual White & White Japan tours. One afternoon, our group was photographing the snow monkeys when a large bus with day tourists from a nearby ski resort arrived for a short stop. Suddenly, we were surrounded by people shooting with iPads and iPhones, mostly selfies, of course. We were standing close to the edge of the hot spring (the monkeys are very relaxed with human presence), when one of the tourists started taking shots with her iPhone, moving her phone closer to the macaque after each shot. It was almost as if she was offering it to the macaque as a gift, so suddenly the macaque grabbed the iPhone from her hands and quickly moved away towards the middle of the hot spring—out of reach. The owner started screaming in agony, but the macaque was too fascinated by its new toy to notice. The minutes that followed were downright hilarious—monkeys already resemble humans in so many ways, but when they’re holding an iPhone the similarities are almost scary. At some stage it even managed to let the built-in flash go off. 

Of course, things didn’t go well for the phone.

When the macaque decided to do some serious underwater testing, the owner of the phone almost fainted. All the while I was fully aware of the fact that this would result in some of the most original snow monkey shots ever. 

Finally, van Oosten explains some of the technical stuff.

I used a Nikon D800 with a 70-200/2.8 VR lens to be able to zoom in on the macaque and isolate it from the surroundings. The shot was taken handheld, so I upped the ISO to 800 to get a shutter speed of 1/250 at an aperture of f/7.1. At times it was hard to focus because there was quite a lot of steam rising from the hot water (a constant 42ºC; outside temperature was below freezing). This also meant that I could not move the lens closer to the water as it would instantly fog up. From all the shots that I took, I picked this one because of the angle of the macaque, the way it is holding the phone, but especially how it is looking at the screen.

Until September 5 you can vote for the picture in the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.