Cell phones, privacy, and manners

This piece overreaches in a few places (the cell phone user as Gnostic is a bit of a stretch), but makes some salient points about the ubiquity of the cell and its consequences. As far as I can tell, what we have is a new technology that has cut across the public/private distinction. Talking on your phone used to be an essentially private activity, but now that you can literally do it anywhere, people haven’t adjusted their phone-behavior from ways that would be appropriate in private to ones more suited to a public setting. Instead we see people behaving in inappropriate, and in many cases downright rude, ways because they seem to think that an invisible bubble of privacy surrounds every cell phone call.