Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Charles Fisher-Cell phones

         Charles Fisher tells of his point of view when it comes to cell phones in his essay Cell Phones and Social Graces. There are good reasons to own a cell phone. For example, they provide a way to contact someone in an emergency. Cell phones enable a person to stay in constant contact. People depend on cell phones too much. We have created a cell phone that can do the same as a home phone line and a computer, so we can incorporate a cell phone in our lives even more. We overuse cell phones too much which gives power to the cell phone companies to do whatever they want to us. They have created secret fees to make us pay even more. Some companies even have fees because you have a certain phone with an application.
         People now tend to overuse cell phones. People now do things that annoy everybody. Fisher gives us a great examples of the over usage of cell phones. Like when he tells of us about the people in grocery stores that feel the need to talk louder than normal. He also tells us about he can no longer attend a movie without being disturbed by a cell phone, by either a ring or a text. He tells of a time when he was in Disney world when a woman on a stallion with her daughter was talking on the phone. The lady could not wait two minutes till the end of the ride to talk to whoever it was, she would rather talk instead of enjoying time with her daughter. The example that disturbs me the most that Fisher tells us is of the one when he was at a bible study. A phone rang and instead of the lady apologizing and turning it off she says “I’ve got to get this.”   
       I remember once I was in my English class taking a final. There were two people sitting with me at the desk I was at. We had just started taking the final I heard a vibrate come from the pocket from the person next to me. Every two minutes there was a vibrate that reminded the person of the text message. It looked like every second that passed drove him crazy. He kept looking to see when the teacher wouldn’t be looking to answer the text. The teacher stood up and walked outside the room and the person answered the text. That’s right when our teacher walked in and saw him, he took his final and gave him a zero. I asked him after class who texted him, and he said, “It was a stupid pointless chain letter.” We give cell phones too much importance to cell phones.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Darkness at Noon

I agree with Harold Krents, people with disabilities are not given the opportunity they deserve. People assume that since he can’t see he cannot hear. People would also assume his eyes don’t work, his ears don’t either. Some people knew that he can hear, but believed that he can’t talk. Once when he was in the hospital, he was being wheeled down to the X-ray room. A person was asking him questions and the person who was wheeling him down was repeating it to him and also repeated his responses too. He was turned down by over forty law firms because of his blindness, even though he studied at Harvard College. He wants one day for people not to know who is disabled and who is normal.
                People still sometimes underestimate people with a disability. And, people assume that because they have one disability they also have another. A thing people do not realize is because they have a disability there other senses are enhanced. These enhanced senses can substitute their missing senses. I remembered watching a movie called blindness. This movie is about a world in which an illness causes the world to go blind. As people went blind people were rejected and sent to an abandoned school. This movie shows how “regular” people who went blind. would suffer. But, there is one guy was born blind. There is a huge difference between him and the rest of the ill people, like there is a scene in which a girl sneaks into a room with the blind people and him, he (the born-blind guy) noticed her. This proves that people with a disability have enhanced other senses.