Analyse af Eula Biss' essay 'Time and Distance Overcome'

We are, today in modern society, more than ever used to the fact that telephones (and now smartphones) play a major role in our everyday lives. It’s almost as if its become a part of us - a new limb, you might say. Believe it or not, though, it wasn’t always like that.

In the essay “Time and Distance Overcome” (2008) Eula Biss tells the story of how the phone initially struggled in America, but finally succeeded and become a normal thing in every household. She uses ethos in the first paragraph by showing that she knows history and what went on at the time. This increases her credibility. She then quickly moves on to logos, as she, in the second paragraph, tries to argue as to why the telephone as a concept at the time would have seemed completely ridiculous. As she writes:

“The idea on which the telephone depended - the idea that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart - seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through wire”.

She quickly tries to establish her pathos: “Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all of us”. By using the phrase “all of us” she makes the reader feel more comfortable and involved, which in turn makes the reader more interested in the text.