Composition Paper - Cell Phones and Social Graces

When reading his personal essay entitled “Cell Phones and Social Graces”, Professor Charles Fisher tries to evoke an image in the minds of his audience with a comparison between the necessity of the device and its role in shaping public behavior. First, he lists the many reasons that a mobile device are useful in applications from business transactions to emergency notifications. Second, he follows many of those points of application with comments in a doubtful tone as to people following such a sensible course of action. This is entailed by recounting several scenarios that he has dealt with in his life involving people behaving in a manner that appear to him in an unfavorable light when held up against the rules of etiquette revolving around the devices in question. The entire essay is set to a slightly patronizing tone, very likely designed to either aggravate or soothe different readers of the essay and cause the reaction of his students to converse about the points therein.

On several points I found myself nodding my head as they really seemed to strike a chord with me as the events that he gives account to are all too common for people to even notice as being a source of embarrassment.

Personal privacy seems to be a now forgotten luxury of an age long ago, when all it means now is your phone is set to voice mail or your ring tone is lowered to vibrate. Charles Fisher has compared it to the influence of a demon, asking why you would need to be available at all hours of the day. Media sites seem to thrive on a steady diet of embarrassment and humiliation fed to them by gawkers with little sense of respect for those who meet with tragedy. In turn the news agencies themselves would be quieter places if they were not chasing down uploads of another celebrity appearing to make a spectacle in outrage as their agents leak the streaming content so the next contract will increase in value. The online stock agencies would likely have to spend more on...