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英语阅读与写作全文及译文 (1)

2023年12月16日发(作者：pummel)

Unit 4

Text A

We’ve got mail ---Always

Is e-mail a blessing or a curse?Last month ,after a week’s vacation.I discovered

1218unread e-mail messages waiting in my IN box. I pretend to be dismayed,but

secretly I was pleased. This is how we messure our wired worth in the late 1900s—if

you are not overwhelmed by e-mail. You must be doing something wrong..

Never mind that after subtracting the stale office chitchat ,spam,flame wars,dumb

jokes forward by friends who should have known better and other e-mail

were perhaps seven messages actually worth reading .I was doomed

to spend half my workday just deleting junk E-mail sucks.

But wait –what about those seven? A close friend in Taipei I haven’t seen in five

years tells me he’s planning to start a family. A complete stranger in Belgium sends

me a hot story r stranger offers me a job. I’d rather lose an eye than lose

my e-mail account .E-mail rocks.

’t live with ’t live without artists and real artists, advertisers

and freedom fighters,lovers and sworn enemies---they’ve all flocked to e-mail as

they would to any new medium og expression.E-mail is convenient,save time,brings

us closer to one another,help us manage our ever-more comples lives. Books are

written,campaigns conducted ,crimes committed---all via ,it is also

inconvenient,wastes our time ,isolates us in front of our computers.e-mail is just the

latest chapter in the evolving history of human communication. A snooping husband

now discovers his wife’s affair by reading her private e-mail—but he could have

uncoverd the same sin by finding letters a generation ago.

Yet e-mail---and all online communication—is in fact something truly different,it

capture the essence od life at the close of the 20th century with an authority that

few other products of digital technology can the pace of life seem ever

faster?E-mail simultaneously allows us to cope with the acceleration and contributes

to our attention spans shriveling under barrages of new,improved forms of

stimulation?The quick and dirty e-mail is made to order for those whose ability to

contrate is measured in we accept that the creation of the

globe-spanning Internet is one of the most important technological innovations of

the last half of this century. Then we must give a e-mail---the living embodiment of

human connection across the Net---pride of place. The way we interact with each

other is changing.e-mail is both the catalyst and the instrument of that change.

The scope of the phenomenon is ide,225milion people can

send and receive about the Web or e-commerce or even online

porography.e-mail is the internet’s true killer app-the sofeware application that we

simply must have .even if means buying a $2000 computer and plunkding down $20

a month to American Online.

Oddly enough, no one planned it, and no one predicted it. When research

scientists first began cooking up the Internet’s predecessor, the Arpanet, in 1968,

their primary goal was to enable disparate computing centers to share resources.

“But it didn’t take very long before they discovered that the most important thing

was the ability to send mail around, which they had not anticipated at all,” says Eric

Allman ,chief technical officer of Sendmail, Inc., and the primary author of a

20-year-old program — Sendmail —that still transports the vast majority of the

world’s e-mail across the Internet . It seems that what all those top computer

scientists really wanted to use the Internet for was as a place to debate, via e-mail ,

such crucially important topics as the best science-fiction novel of all time .Even

though Allman is now quite proud that his software helps hundreds of millions of

people communicate, he says he didn’t set out originally to change the world. As a

systems administrator at UC Berkeley in the late 70s, he was constantly hassled by

computer-science researchers in one building who wanted to get their e-mail from

machines in another location. “I just wanted to make my life easier,” says Allman.

Don’t we all? When my first child was born in 1994, e-mail seemed to me some

kind of Promethean gift perfectly designed to help me cope with the irreconcilable

pressures of new-fatherhood and full-time freelance writing. It saved me time and

money without ever requiring me to leave the house; it salvaged my social life,

allowed me to conduct interviews as a reporter and kept a lifeline open to my

far-flung extended family. Indeed, I finally knew for sure that the digital world was

viscerally potent when I found myself in the middle of a bitter fight with my

mother— on e-mail. Again, new medium, old story.

My mother had given me an e-mail head start. In 1988, she bought me a

modem so I could create a CompuServe account. The reason? Her younger brother

had contracted a rapidly worsening case of Parkinson’s disease. He wasn’t able to

talk clearly, and could hardly scrawl his name with a pen or pencil. But he had a

computer, and could peck out words on a keyboard. My mom figured that if the

family all had CompuServe accounts, we could send him e-mail. She grasped, long

before the Internet became a household word, how online communication offered

new possibilities for transcending physical limitations, how as simple a thing as

e-mail could bring us closer to those whom we love.

It may even help us find those whom we want to love in the first

Shreve is a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area who keeps a close eye on

the emerging culture of the new online generation. For the last couple of years, she’s

seen what she considers to be a positive change in online dating habits. E-mail, she

argues, encourages the shy. “It offers a semi-risk-free environment to initiate

romance,” says Shreve. “Because it lacks the immediate threat of physical rejection,

people who are perhaps shy or had painful romantic failures in the past can use the

Internet as a way to build a relationship in the early romantic stages.”

But it’s not just about lust. E-mail also flattens hierarchies within the bounds

of an It is far easier, Shreve notes, to make a suggestion to your superiors and

colleagues via e-mail than it is to do so in a pressure-filled meeting room. “Any time

when you have something that is difficult to say, e-mail can make it easier,” she says.

“It serves as a buffer zone.”

Of course, e-mail’s use as a social lubricant can be taken to extremes. There

is little point in denying the obvious dark side to the lack of self-constraints

encouraged by e-mail. Purveyors of pornography rarely call us on the phone and

suggest out loud that we check out some“hot teen action.” But they don’t think twice

about jamming our e-mail boxes full of outrageously prurient advertisements.

People who would never insult us face to face will spew the vilest, most

objectionable, most appalling rhetoric imaginable via e-mail or an instant message,

or in the no-holds-barred confines of a chat room.

Cyberspace’s lapse in genitility underscores a central contradiction inherent in

online communication. If it is true that hours spent on the Net are often hours

subtracted from watching television, one could argue that the digital era has raised

the curtains on a new age of literacy—more people are writing more words than ever

before! But what kind of are we writing? Are we really more literate, or are we

sliding ever faster into a quicksand of meaningless irrelevance, of pop-cultural

triviality-expressed,usually,in lowercase letters-run amok? E-mail is actually too

easy,too casual. Gone are the days when one would worry over a letter to a lover or

a relative or a colleague. Now there’s just time for that quick e-mail,a few hastily

cobbled together thoughts written in a colloquial style that usually borders on

unedited stream of consciousness. The danger is obvious: snippy comments to a

friend,overly sharp retores to one’s boss,insults mistakenly sent to the target, not

the intended audience.e-mail allows us to act before we can think-the perfect tool

for a culture of hyperstimulation.

So instead of creating something new, we forward something old. instead of

crafting the perfect phrase,we use a brain-dead abbreviation:IMHO for In My

Humble Opinion,or ROTFLMAO,for Rolling on The Floor Laughing My Ass a

rumor?E-mail is to 50 people!Instead messaging and chat room just accentuate the

casual negative. If e-mail requires little thought, then instant

messaging——flashing a message directly onto a recipitent’s computer

monitor——is so insubstantial as to be practically nonexistent.

E-mail,ultimately, is a fragile thing,easy to forge,easy to corrupt, easy to

destroy. A few weeks ago a coworker of mine accidentally and irretrievably wiped

out 1,500 of his own saved message. For a person who conducts the bulk of his life

online,such a digital tragedy is akin to erasing part of your own

ly,nothing’s let. If is comforting to think that,if preserved in a

retrievable way, all the notes the world is passing back and forth today constitute a

vast historical archive,but the opposite may also be true. Earlier this summer, I

visited some curators at Stanford University Library who are hard at work compliling

a digital archive of Silicon Valley history. They bemoaned a new,fast-spreading

corporate policy that requires the deletion of all corporate e-mails after 60 or 90

days. As Microsofe and Netscape have learned to their dismay,old e-mails,however

trivial they seem when they are written,can and will come back to haunt you. Say

the lawyers,to just wipe them all out.

Still,e-mail is enabling radically new forms of worldwide human collaboration.

Those 225 million people who can send and receive it represent a network of

potentially cooperating individuals dwarfing anything that even the mightiest

corporation or government can muster. mailing-list discussion groups and onlion

conferencing allow us to gather together to work on a mutitude of projects that are

intersted or helpful to us——to pool our collective efforts in a fation never before

most obvious place to see this collaboration right now is in the world of

software. For decades,programers have used e-mail to collaborate on projects. With

increasing frequency,this collaboration is occurring across company lines,and often

without even the spur of commercial incentives. It’s happening largely because it

can——it’s relatively easy for a thousand programmers to collectively contribute to

a project using e-mail and the internet. Perhaps each individual contribution is

small,but the scale of the internet multiplies all efforts dramatically.

我们收到了邮件---从不间断

是福是祸？上个月，在一周休假之后，我在收件箱中发现了1218封未读邮件，我假装气恼，却暗自窃喜。如果你没被淹没，你一定是出了问题---这就是20世纪90年代末我们衡量自身有限价值的方式。

不必在意除去那些乏味的办公室闲聊，垃圾邮件，网上唇舌剑，朋友转发来的本不该转发的愚蠢笑话以及通过发送的电子杂志，真正值得一读的也许只有7封邮件。注定我得花上半个工作日删除垃圾邮件。令人讨厌。

且慢---那7封值得一读的邮件如何？5年未见的一位台北好友告诉我他打算开始成立家庭了。比利时的一位陌生人发来了一则热门新闻的内幕。另一位陌生人给我提供了一份工作。我宁可失去一只眼睛月不愿失去我的账户。让人痴狂。

啊，我们不能靠他生活但离开它也不行，增加艺术家，广告商，为只有而战的英勇卫士，恋人，不共戴天的敌人---他们纷纷涌向，一如他们涌向任何一种新的表达工具。方便，省时，拉近人们相互间的距离，帮助我们处理日益纷乱的生活，著书，一系列活动的展开，犯罪---皆可通过，但有事不便的，它浪费我们的时间，用电脑把我们彼此隔离，使我们本已烦乱和生活变得更加复杂，对于怀疑论者而言，不过是人类交流演变史上最新的一个章节，窥探妻子的丈夫现在可以通过妻子的私人邮件发现她和别人的暧昧关系----而二三十年前她同样可以通过信件发现妻子的隐情。

然而，以及所有在线交流，实际上是一种全新的东西，在20世纪末它以大多数的数字技术产品所不具备的权威力捕捉了生活的本质，生活节奏时候越来越快？在帮我们应对这种加速的同时，有助长了加速的发生，我们的注意力持续时间在连珠炮似的新型的先进的刺激方式影响之下，时候变得越来越短？快速而龌龊的正式为那些注意力持续时间以微毫秒计的人而预定的。如果我们承认遍及全球的因特网是本世纪后半页最重要的技术创新之一的话，我们就必须赋予-----人们通过网络相互联系的真实体现-------一席荣耀之地。人们互动的方式正在发生改变，而既是改变的催化剂，又是改变的工具。

这一现象涉及面之广。

这一现象涉及面之广令人惊叹，全球范围内，有2亿2千万5百万可以收发邮件，别提

万维网，电子商务或者在线情内容，是因特网的真正杀手级应用----即我们必须具备的软件设备，即便这意味着购置一台2000美元的电脑以及每月向美国在线支付20美元的费用。奇怪的是，这一切无人计划，无人预见。当科学家们于1968年最早策划因特网的前身阿尔派网时，他们的首要目标是使不同的计算机中心分享资源。“然而，不久他们便发现其最重要的作用是散发邮件，这一点他们根本没有料想到”埃里克。奥尔曼。Sendmail公司的技术主管——他也是问世已有20年之久的Sendmail程序的主要编写者，世界上绝大部分现在仍然通过Sendmail在因特网上传送——这样说道。似乎那些顶级计算机科学家真正想做的，是把因特网作为一个通过探讨哪部科幻小说最棒之类最重要话题的场所。尽管奥尔曼为他的程序系统能帮助成千上万的人交流沟通颇感自豪，但他坦言他原本并没想要改变世界。作为70年代末加州大学伯克分校的系统管理人，他时常被计算机科学研究人员所烦扰，那些研究人员要求获取另一幢大楼计算机里的。“我只想使我的生活变得简单。”奥尔曼说。

我们何尝不是呢？当我第一个孩子1994年出生的时候，对我来说好似普罗米修斯的礼物，恰好帮我应对初为人父和全取自由撰稿之间不可调和的压力。它帮我省时省钱，又不需要我离开家门；它拯救了我的社交生活，让我作为记者进行采访，与此同时和分散在四处的亲人保持送信联络的通畅。其实，我最终确切地知道数字世界的力量不可小觑，是在我与发现我与母亲通过争吵不休的时候，又一次，新的工具演绎老的故事。

由于母亲的原因我比大多数人都更早地使用e-mail。1998年的时候，她为我买了一个调制解调器以便我创立一个CompuServe账户。原因是她弟弟患上了急速恶化的帕金森病。他不能清楚的说话，几乎也不能用钢笔或铅笔写他的名字。但他有一台电脑，能够在键盘上敲出一个又一个字。我母亲认为如果家庭成员都有CompuServe账户，我们便可以给他发邮件。早在因特网家喻户晓之前，我母亲就领会到在线交流如何能为超越身体局限提供新的可能，像这么简单的东西如何能把我们和我们所爱之人拉得更近。

甚至能帮我们到我们想爱之人。詹·什里夫是旧金山海湾地区的一位自由撰稿人，她一直在留心观察新在线一代的新兴文化。在过去的几年里，她目睹了在她看来是网上约会习惯的积极变化。她认为通过邮件网上约会能鼓励那些天性害羞的人。“它提供了一个风险降低了一半的恋爱氛围。” 詹·什里夫说，“这是因为网上恋爱没有对外表产生抵触的直接威胁，那些腼腆的或者过去有过痛苦恋爱经历的人可以在恋爱早期通过因特网建立关系。”

不仅仅关乎情欲。同样可以淡化办公室的等级观念。什里夫说给上级或者同事通过提个建议远比在充满压力的会议室里简单得多。“每当你有什么难以开口的事要说，写个会使之变得简单得多。”她说，“起着缓冲作用。”

当然，作为社交润滑剂的使用有时也会走向极端。避讳引发的自律缺失的负面效应，这一做法几乎毫无意义。提供情内容的网站很少会打电话大声提议我们去看看“欲火中烧的青少年性交”，可是他们却会不假思索地往我们的邮箱滥发极度淫秽的广告。从不当面侮辱我们的人也会通过或即时信息或在不设阻拦的聊天室里向我们发送最污秽、最令人作呕、最令人发指的言语。

网络空间文明礼貌的丧失突出了在线交流的内在主要矛盾。诚然，人们花在网上的时间是从看电视那里省出来的，有人便宣称数字时代拉开了一个新文化时代的序幕——比起以往，更多的人在写更多的字了！但是，我们在写什么字呢？我们真的是更有文化修养，还是更快地滑入毫无意义的空谈以及浅薄不堪的流行文化的陷阱？那些东西常以小写字母书写，在网上大肆泛滥。尝尝太简单，太随意。为一封写给恋人或亲戚或同事的信而斟词酌句的日子一去不复返了。现在的人们匆匆写就，几个仓促拼凑的想法，以口语化的文体表达，近乎未经剪辑的意识流。其危险显而易见：发给朋友的话语唐突尖刻，发给老

板的反驳过于刻薄，侮辱性语言发错了对象。允许我们未思而先行，真可谓极度刺激型文化的绝妙工具。

其结果就是我们不是早就新的东西，二是转发旧的东西；不是独具匠心地遣词造句，二是使用无厘头的缩写；IMHO表示“以鄙人之间”，ROTFLMAO意为“我笑得在地上打滚”。听到了一则传闻？把它发给50个人！即时信息和聊天室恰恰强化了这种草率行为的负面效应。如果说写一封几乎不需要什么思考，那么即时信息——将消息火速发到接收人电脑的显示器上则更是没有实质内容，近乎虚无缥缈。

说到底，是个脆弱的东西，易于撰写，易于讹传，易于销毁。几周前，我的一个同事意外地、不可挽回地删除了他存储的1，500封信。对于他这么一个生活在线上的人来说，这样一个数字悲剧几乎等于抹杀了部分记忆。刹那间，不留意思痕迹。令人颇感欣慰的是，如果以一种可检索的方式保存，世事来来往往的种种记录可以构成一个庞大的历史档案。但是，反之亦然。今年初夏，我拜访了斯坦福法学的图书馆管理人员，他们正一丝不苟地编写硅谷历史的数字档案。他们对一种新的、快速流传的公司政策跌声抱怨，该政策要求所有公司邮件每隔60天或90天删除一次。这是因为微软和Netscape公司懊恼地发现，旧的邮件，无论多么微不足道，总是会在日后纠缠你。因而，律师们说最好的对策就是将他们彻底删除。

尽管如此，使全球范围内人及合作的全新模式成为可能。那2亿2千5百万可能够收发邮件的人代表了一个可能参与合作的众多个体的网络。该网络聚集人数之多使得任何大公司或政府机构相形见绌。收件人讨论小组记忆在线回忆是我们能就许多有趣或有助的项目通力合作，以一种全新的方式集思广益。目前这种合作最易发生在计算机的程序系统里。几十年来，编程员利用在各个项目上相互写作。这是因为成百上千的编程员通过或网络就一项目全力协作相对来说要容易些。个人的力量也许很渺小，但是因特网的规模使得众人的力量无限放大。

Text B

Is the Web Isolating You?

Fred Langa

It made headlines several weeks ago: Researchers at Stanford University's

SIQSS (Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society) conducted a

national survey of Web users that led the researchers to the following conclusions:

"The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real

human beings. ... The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that

reduces our participation in communities even more than television did. … This is an

early trend that, as a society, we really need to monitor carefully."

The study was conducted at the end of last year and used information provided

by 2,689 households that were enlisted by a random telephone survey and given a

free WebTV and free Internet access. In an effort to fi1ter out "contamination"

caused by the fact that the survey was itself Web-based, the final results were

drawn only from among those participants who already had some form of Internet

access at home or work prior to the survey.

The study has all the normal trappings of objectivity and statistical validity, but

to me, it appears the researchers' interpretation of the results is rooted in a subt1e,

but distinct anti-Web/anti-tech bias. This is especially disturbing in light of the wide

play the survey got in the national media.

Let me pick one glaring example: the study trumpets that 26 percent of Internet

users report they spend less time talking with family and friends on the phone --

clearly, a symptom of increasing social isolation, right?

But the same study shows that by far the most common Internet activity is

sending and receiving e-mail. Amazingly, nowhere in the study did I find anything

that recognized what is, to me, the obvious causal link: E-mail simply has replaced

the phone for many routine types of communication. The interpersonal interaction

still takes place; it's just shifted from one medium to another.

But the researchers seem to have missed that. Worse，they appear to regard

e-mail as a socially inferior medium. For example, in a press release about the study,

one researcher says, “E-mail is a way to stay in touch, but you can't share a coffee

or a beer with somebody on e-mail or give them a hug.”

OK. But you can't share a coffee or a beer or a hug by telephone, either. So,

wouldn't it stand to reason that the more time we spend on the phone, the more

socially isolated we are? And you know, you also can't share a coffee or a beer or a

hug by snail mail, so every time you send someone a card or a letter, you're merely

increasing your social isolation, right?

What’s Wrong with This Thinking

Clearly, there’s something wrong with this thinking, and I think the clue to what

the flaw is can be found in the same press where one of the researchers says, “For

the most past, the Internet is an individual activity.”

But the study says that e-mail is the No.1 Internet activity. That’s “individual”

only if you see one end of the connection, or only if you somehow come to believe

that in communicating online, you’re interacting with your computer rather than

your correspondents.

By the same logic, if you talk on the phone, you’re really just interacting with a

speaker and microphone an some wires, right? Oh wait, that can’t be right ——as we

saw above,” talking with family and friends on the phone” is a good thing, the loss of

which represents increasing social isolation. So, by the weird logic of this research

paper, communication by older technology like the phone is socially connecting, but

communication by a newer technology——e-mail——is socially isolating.

I believe that strange distinction makes sense only when you view this subject

through the strong, distorting lens of personal bias: Some people are inherently

“touchy-feely” and simply can’t connect unless they can at least hear another’s

voice. To these people, e-mail will always come up short.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are times when there’s no substitute for the

touch or voice of a friend or a loved one. But many people, especially those

comfortable with the written word, have no trouble maintaining social connections

by e-mail.

In fact, I think e-mail can be the very antithesis of isolating. If a friend sends me,

say, a small joke by e-mail - a joke too small to warrant a phone call or a

face-to-face meeting --I can smile and feel good at being thought of. It's

communication that otherwise would not have happened, and adds to the totality of

social connectedness rather than detracts from it.

This seems obvious to me. People gravitate to the medium that works best for

their needs. For touchy-feely people, e-mail is lousy. But for others, e-mail actually

increases and enhances communication and connectedness. The fact that e-mail is

the No. 1 online activity is concrete evidence that there's a huge number of people

who feel like wise.

Yes, e-mail is different from face-to-face communication or the telephone or

other media. As a neutral statement, that's fine. But it gets scary when a social

scientist engaged in the "Quantitative Study of Society" assigns qualitative value

judgments to communication media. In effect: "Lots of phone calls mean you're

socially interconnected; lots of e-mail means you're socially isolated, and part of a

trend that society must monitor carefully."

Connectedness vs. Isolation

Socially speaking, "connectedness" and "isolation" are both relative and

subjective terms.

Amazingly, the researchers never asked the survey participants if they

themselves felt more or less connected. They never asked if participants felt more

or less isolated or if their lives had improved or deteriorated or if other family

members or friends had complained or even commented on the users' supposed

isolation or connectedness. Instead, the researchers asked ostensibly neutral

questions and then inferred the degree of connectedness or isolation according to

an unspecified, and in my opinion, biased scale.

That flaw in the study can't be rectified, but perhaps it can be illuminated.

Consider: Byte' readers have been online longer than almost any other group I know,

stretching back to the early days of ARPAnet2• A decade ago, before most people

had even heard of the Internet, Byte's commercial online system (BIX) was among

the very first to have full interconnectivity between its e-mail system and standard

Internet e-mail.

Surely, if social isolation and unconnectedness is a problem, it would have

shown up in this sample - Byte readers - sooner and stronger than in the public at

large.

So, in an admittedly anecdotal and nonscientific way, let me ask you: Has the

Internet and Web enhanced or detracted from the social connectedness of your life?

Does the online world make you feel more isolated, or less? Does it strengthen the

social fabric of your life, or weaken it? Do you have e-mail friends whom you never

(or rarely) meet in person? If so, are these friendships inferior to ones that rely