新Unit 5- Is Google Making Us Stupid.doc

Internet: absolute communication , absolute isolationIs Google Making Us Stupid?1. Over the past few years Ive had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isnt goingso far as I can tellbut its changing. Im not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when Im reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and Id spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. Thats rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if Im always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. 1. 在过去的几年里，我总有一种坐立不安的感觉，觉得好像什么人或什么东西正在修理我的大脑，重新布局我的神经回路，然后重新安排了我的记忆。我的思想没有消失（目前为止我暂时可以这样讲），但却在发生变化。我不再像过去那样思考。这种感觉在我读书时尤为强烈。在过去，将自己沉浸于一本书或一篇长篇文章中是一件轻而易举的事。我的思维会被文章的叙事描写与论证的峰回路转所吸引，常常花几个小时在一篇篇长篇大论的散文间流连忘返。然而，这样的经历已经越来越少了。如今，刚翻过两三页书，我就开始心不在焉。我变得烦躁不安，找不到头绪，总是想做其他的事。我感觉自己好像总是得把不听话的大脑强行拉回到书本中。以往自然而然地静心潜读在现在已然变成了一场斗争。2. I think I know whats going on. For more than a decade now, Ive been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and Ive got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when Im not working, Im as likely as not to be foraging in the Webs info-thickets reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which theyre sometimes likened, hyperlinks dont merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)2. 我想我知道这是怎么回事。在过去十多年中，我一直花很多时间在网上，搜索、冲浪，有时也会为互联网庞大的数据库贡献点一己之力。对我这个作家而言，网络简直是天赐之物。过去需要在图书馆的书堆或期刊室里花上数天才能做完的研究，如今只要几分钟便可搞定。只需试几个Google搜索，点击几个超级链接，我想要的八卦新闻或经典格言便唾手可得。即使在工作之余，我也很有可能在信息丰富的网络里遨游收发电子邮件、浏览头条新闻、点击博客、看视频、听播客或者从一个链接跳转到一个又一个链接。（超链接常被比作脚注，但和脚注又不同，超链接不仅仅链接到相关作品；它们还驱使你去点击它们。）3. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and theyve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wireds Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.3. 对我来说(对其他人也一样)，网络正在成为一个全球性的媒体，它就像是一个运送绝大多数信息的管道，这些信息经由我的眼睛和耳朵，最后进入我的大脑。在转瞬间获得难以置信的海量信息，其优势不胜枚举，而且也得到了广泛的描述和适当的赞誉。连线杂志的克莱夫汤普森曾描述说：“硅存储器的完美记忆性对于思考来说是一个大实惠。”但是这个实惠是要付出代价的。就像媒体理论家马歇尔麦克卢恩在上世纪60年代所指出的那样：媒体不只是被动的信息渠道。它们提供思想内容，但同时也塑造思维模式。网络就似乎正在削弱我的专注力和思维能力。现在，我的大脑在获取信息时，正在按照网络传播信息的方式来进行：快速移动，像粒子流一样。过去我像个潜水者一样，在文字的海洋里潜游；而现在我就像一个骑着摩托艇的家伙，在海面上呼啸着前进。4. Im not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintancesliterary types, most of themmany say theyre having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a literature major in college, and used to be a voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. Im just seeking convenience, but because the way I think has changed?”4. 我并不是唯一一个有此感觉的人。当我向文学界的朋友和熟人提到我在阅读方面的困扰时，许多人说他们也有同样的感受。他们上网越多，在阅读长文章时，就越难集中精力。我所关注的一些博主也提到了类似的现象。斯科特卡普开通了一个有关在线媒体的博客。最近他承认自己已经完全不读书了。“我大学主修文学专业，曾经是一个嗜书如命的人，”他写道，“到底发生了什么事情呢？”他推测出一个答案：“我在网络上阅读与其说是因为我的阅读方式已经发生了改变（譬如，我只是寻求方便），还不如说是因为我思维方式已经发生了改变，即便如此，那又会怎样呢？”5. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I cant read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “Ive lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”5. 布鲁斯弗雷德曼，一个定期发表关于计算机在医学界应用的博文的博主，也描述了网络如何改变了他的思维习惯。在今年早些时候，他写道，“我现在已经几乎完全丧失了阅读和专注于一篇稍长文章的能力，不论其是网络版还是纸质版。” 弗雷德曼是一名在密歇根州医大学从教了很长时间的病理学家。在我们的一次电话交谈中，他详细说明了他的情况。他说他的思维已经呈现出一种“碎读”式的特性，这种特性折射出了他从众多在线资源中快速扫描短篇文本文章的思维方式。他承认：“我再也不能阅读战争与和平了，我已经丧失了那种能力。甚至在博客上如果超过三四段内容，我就觉得太多而难以集中精力去消化。这时，我就会采取略读。”6. Anecdotes alone dont prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source theyd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes theyd save a long article, but theres no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.6. 仅仅只有奇闻轶事还不能说明问题。我们仍然在期待长期的神经学和心理学实验能够给我们提供一个关于英特网的使用如何影响我们认知的清晰明了的画面。但是最近由伦敦大学学者们指导出版的在线学习习惯的研究指出：我们可能刚好处于改变我们阅读和思考方式的海洋之中。作为五年研究计划的一部分，这些学者们对两个提供期刊文章、电子书以及其他写作信息资源入口、并且广受欢迎的站点（一个由英国图书馆运营，另一个由英国教育联盟运营）进行了研究。通过对电脑日志记录中浏览者的浏览行为的研究，这些学者们发现人们在使用这些站点的时候呈现出一种“略读形式”，从一个资源跳到另一个资源，并且很少返回到他们已经浏览过的资源。他们有代表性的阅读不多于一两篇文章或书籍，然后退出跳到另外一个站点。有时，他们会保存一篇长的文章，但是并没有重新回到文章并且认真阅读的迹象。7. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But its a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinkingperhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.7. 幸亏只是提及到网络上无处不在的文字，更不用说手机上备受欢迎的文本信息。我们今天的阅读量与二十世纪七八十年代相比不可同日而语。那时，只有电视一种媒介选择。但这是不一样的阅读，而隐藏在这种阅读之后的又是不一样的思维或许是对自我的一种新认识。“不是阅读的内容塑造了我们，”塔夫斯大学的发展心理学家、普鲁斯特与鱿鱼：阅读思维的科学与故事的作者玛丽安娜沃尔夫说，“而是阅读的方式塑造了我们。”沃尔夫担心，网络所推崇的将“效率”和“直观”置于一切之上的阅读方式可能会削弱我们深度阅读的能力，而这种能力是伴随着印刷这种早期技术的产生而逐渐形成的，也正是这种早期技术才使得长篇、复杂的作品变得日渐普及。她说，当我们在网上阅读时，我们更像是“纯粹的信息解码者”。我们理解文字的能力，潜心深读时思如泉涌的能力，大部分都没派上用场。 8. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. Its not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.8. 沃尔夫解释说，阅读不是人类与生俱来的一种技能。它不像说话一样是天生就融进我们基因里的。我们必须教会我们的大脑如何将我们看到的符号转化成为可以理解的语言。而我们平时用来学习和练习阅读技巧的媒体和其他技术，对于我们塑造我们大脑里的神经回路，发挥着重要作用。实验证明表意文字（比如中文）的阅读者开发出了阅读的一种精神线路，而这种线路与我们当中那些以字母作为书面语言的人的线路是很不相同的。这种变化通过许多大脑区域进行扩展，包括那些控制我们诸如记忆这样的关键认知功能、以及对我们视觉和听觉刺激进行解释的区域。我们也能预料，通过使用网络形成的线路与那些通过阅读书籍和其他印刷作品形成的线路是不同的。9. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewritera Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. 9. 在1882年的某个时候，弗里德里希尼采买了一台打字机确切地讲，是莫林-汉森滚珠式写作打字机。尼采的视觉有问题，当他眼睛保持聚焦于一张页面上的时候，就变得非常疲劳和痛苦，常常还会引起头痛。他曾被迫缩短他的写作，并且担心不久之后可能不得不放弃写作。但这台打字机救了他，至少在一段时间里是这样的。一旦他掌握了盲打，他就能闭着眼睛，只需要使用他的指尖，单词就会一个接一个的从他的大脑流转到纸张中。 10. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsches friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “thoughts in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” 10. 但是，这台机器对他的写作产生了微妙的影响。尼采的一个作曲家朋友发现了他写作风格的变化。他曾经精炼式的散文风格现在变得更加紧密，更加电报化。“也许你能利用这一工具达到一种新的风格。”这个朋友在一封信中写道，并指出在他自己的作品中，他“音乐和语言中的思想常常取决于钢笔和纸张的质量。”Choose the sentence that best expresses the meaning of the sentence from the text.I feel as if im always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.I feel as if i am so immersed in the text that nothing can tear me awayI feel as if the text is virtually incomprehensible to me.I feel as if i have lost my ability to do critical thinking about the text.I feel as if i am constantly struggling to concentrate on the text.im as likely as not to be foraging in the Webs info-thickets.Chances are that i am surfing on the Internet.Its likely that i am losing my way in the information era.I am unaccustomed to searching for information on the Net.Rarely have i found information of great help on the Net.The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking. But that boon comes at a price.The fabulous recall of silicon memory can make thinking a lot easier, but it is rather hazardous.The extraordinary capacity for memory can be of enormous assistance to thinking, but this can bring on negative consequences.Silicon memory has unparalleled ability which can facilitate thinking, but it is extremely expensive.The perfect capability to recall things in the past can improve thinking, but it consumes a lot of effort.What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.The Net acts as a great assistant in enhancing my capacity for concentration and thinking .My capacity for concentration and tinking appears to be dwindling due to the use of the Net.Whether one is able to concentrate and do critical thinking is largely dependent upon the Net.I am focusing my attention on the Net and contemplating it.Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.I used to be keen on scuba diving, but now i am interested in jet-skiing.I felt at sea about the meaning of reading once, but now i am at ease about reading.I took a keen interest in guessing new words while reading a passage in the past, but now i pay more attention to the gist of the passage.Once i chose to do deep reading, but now i opt to skim and scan while reading.His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato”quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.The “staccato” quality of his thinking is indicative of the way he reads short passages on the Web quickly.The defining characteristic of his thinking mode is adopted from many online sources.His particular thoughts are tremendously affected by his way of reading on the Internet.The way he thinks mirrors his efficient way of reading on the Web.Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980sWe are reading more books today than in the 1970s or 1980s because of the popularity of the Internet and