Unit 2 Bards of the Internet 课文翻译

精选文库Unit 2 Bards of the InternetPhillip Elmer-Dewitt1.One of the unintended side effects of the invention of the telephone was that writing went out of style. Oh, sure, there were still full-time scribblers journalists, academics, professional wordsmiths. And the great centers of commerce still found it useful to keep on hand people who could draft a memo, a brief, a press release or a contract. But given a choice between picking up a pen or a phone, most folks took the easy route and gave their fingers and sometimes their mind a rest.2.Which makes whats happening on the computer networks all the more startling. Every night, when they should be watching television, millions of computer users sit down at their keyboards; dial into CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or the Internet; and start typing E-mail, bulletin-board postings, chat messages, rants, diatribes, even short stories and poems. Just when the media of McLuhan were supposed to render obsolete the medium of Shakespeare, the online world is experiencing the greatest boom in letter writing since the 18th century.3.“It is my overwhelming belief that E-mail and computer conferencing is teaching an entire generation about the flexibility and utility of prose,” writes Jon Carroll, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, compares electronic bulletin boards with the “scribblers compacts” of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in which members passed letters from hand to hand, adding a little more at each turn. David Sewell, an associate editor at the University of Arizona, likens netwriting to the literary scene Mark Twain discovered in San Francisco in the 1860s, “when people were reinventing journalism by grafting it onto the tall-tale folk tradition.” Others hark back to Tom Paine and the Revolutionary War pamphleteers, or even to the Elizabethan era, when, thanks to Gutenberg, a generation of English writers became intoxicated with language.4.But such comparisons invite a question: If online writing today represents some sort of renaissance, why is so much of it so awful? For it can be very bad indeed: sloppy, meandering, puerile, ungrammatical, poorly spelled, badly structured and at times virtually content free. “HEY! 1 !” reads an all too typical message on the Internet, “I THINK METALLICA IZ REEL KOOL DOOD! 1 !”5.One reason, of course, is that E-mail is not like ordinary writing. “You need to think of this as written speech,” says Gerard Van der Leun, literary agent based in Westport, Connecticut, who has emerged as one of the preeminent stylists on the Net. “These things are little more considered than coffeehouse talk and a lot less considered than a letter. Theyre not to have and hold; theyre to fire and forget.” Many online postings are composed “live” with the clock ticking, using rudimentary word processors on computer systems that charge by the minute and in some cases will shut down without warning when an hour runs out.6.That is not to say that with more time every writer on the Internet would produce a sparkling copy. Much of the fiction and poetry is second-rate or worse, which is not surprising, given that the barriers to entry are so low. “In the real world,” says Mary Anne Mohanraj, a Chicago-based poet, “it takes a hell of a lot of work to get published, which naturally weeds out a lot of the garbage. On the Net, just a few keystrokes sends your writing out to thousands of readers.”7.But even among the reams of bad poetry, gems are to be found. Mike Godwin, a Washington-based lawyer who posts under the pen name “mnemonic,” tells the story of Joe Green, a technical writer at Cray Research who turned a moribund discussion group called rec.arts.poems into a real poetry workshop by mercilessly critiquing the pieces he found there. “Some people got angry and said if he was such a god of poetry, why didnt he publish his poems to the group?” recalls Godwin. “He did, and blew them all away.” Greens Well Met in Minnesota, a mock-epic account of a face-to-face meeting with a fellow network scribbler, is now revered on the Internet as a classic. It begins, “The truth is that when I met Mark I was dressed as the Canterbury Tales. Rather difficult to do as you might suspect, but I wanted to make a certain impression.”8.The more prosaic technical and political discussion groups, meanwhile, have become so crowded with writers crying for attention that a Darwinian survival principle has started to prevail. “Its so competitive that you have to work on your style if you want to make any impact,” says Jorn Barger, a software designer in Chicago. Good writing on the Net tends to be clear, vigorous, witty and above all brief. “The medium favors the terse,” says Crawford Kilian, a writing teacher at Capilano College in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Short paragraphs, bulleted lists and one-liners are the units of thought here.”9.Some of the most successful netwriting is produced in computer conferences, where writers compose in a kind of collaborative heat, knocking ideas against one another until they spark. Perhaps the best examples of this are found on the WELL, a Sausalito, California bulletin board favored by journalists. The caliber of discussion is often so high that several publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have printed excerpts from the WELL.10. Curiously, what works on the computer networks isnt necessarily what works on paper. Netwriters freely lace their prose with strange acronyms and “smileys,” the little faces constructed with punctuation marks and intended to convey the winks, grins and grimaces of ordinary conversations. Somehow it all flows together quite smoothly. On the other hand, polished prose copied onto bulletin boards from books and magazines often seems long-winded and phony. Unless they adjust to the new medium, professional writers can come across as self-important blowhards in debates with more nimble networkers. Says Brock Meeks, a Washington-based reporter who covers the online culture for Communications Daily: “There are a bunch of hacker kids out there who can string a sentence together better than their blue-blooded peers simply because they log on all the time and write, write, write.”11. There is something inherently democratizing perhaps even revolutionary about the technology. Not only has it enfranchised thousands of would-be writers who otherwise might never have taken up the craft, but it has also thrown together classes of people who hadnt had much direct contact before: students, scientists, senior citizens, computer geeks, grassroots (and often blue-collar) bulletin-board enthusiasts and most recently the working press.12. “Its easy to make this stuff look foolish and trivial,” says Tor Books Nielsen Hayden. “After all, a lot of everyones daily life is foolish and trivial. I mean, really, smileys? Housewives in Des Moines who log on as VIXEN?”13.But it would be a mistake to dismiss the computer-message boards or to underestimate the effect a lifetime of dashing off E-mail will have on a generation of young writers. The computer networks may not be Brook Farm or the Globe Theatre, but they do represent, for millions of people, a living, breathing life of letters. One suspects that the Bard himself, confronted with the Internet, might have dived right in and never logged off.1.电话的发明，产生了一个始料不及的后果，书写过时了。诚然，全职的写字工仍然存在，包括记者、学者以及职业写手。大型商业中心仍然很有必要保留一些能草拟备忘录、会议纪要、新闻稿或者合同的人。但是在举笔和拿起话筒之间选择的话，大多数人都会走便道，让手指有时还有大脑休息片刻。2.与之相比，当前计算机网络上发生的现象就更为惊人了。每个夜晚，当人们本应该看电视的时候，成千上万的计算机用户坐在键盘前，点击进入“电脑服务”、“奇才”、“美国在线”或互联网，并开始打字 发电子邮件、发布信息、聊天、夸夸其谈、谩骂，甚至创作短篇小说和诗歌。当麦克卢汉所说的媒介正在淘汰莎士比亚时代的媒介时，网络世界正经历着18世纪以来信件书写最为迅猛的发展。3.“我确信电子邮件和网上会议正在教会整整一代人写文章是多么有用，可以灵活到何种程度，”旧金山纪事报的专栏 作家乔恩卡洛尔这样写道。石山图书出版社的编辑帕特里克尼尔森海顿把当今的电子公告板比作18世纪末19世纪初的“文字盒”：这是个小盒子，盒内的文章在多人间传递，每人经 手时都会增加一些句子。来自亚利桑那大学的副主编大卫塞维尔则将网络写作喻为马克吐温在19世纪60年代在旧金山所发现的文学景象，“当时人们将新闻报道嫁接到夸张的民俗传统故事之中，创造了新的新闻报道方式 ”。更有甚者，有人想起了汤姆潘恩和美国革命时期政治小册子作家，甚至还想起了伊丽莎白一世时期，古腾堡活字印刷术的发明，令一代英国作家沉迷在语言之中。4. 可是这种比较又引出一个问题：如果说当今的网络写作代表了某种复兴，但为何这么多网络作品又如此糟糕呢？网络写作可能会低劣不堪：文体拖沓、漫无边际、愚蠢幼稚、不合语法、拼写糟糕、结构不当，有时甚至毫无内容可言，正如网络上典型的短信息所示：“嗨！1！我觉得金属乐队酷毙了！1 ！”5. 当然，原因之一就是电子邮件不同于常规写作。“你得把它看成是写下来的话，”康涅狄格州西港镇的文学作品经纪人杰勒德凡德勒恩如是说，此人是最近在网络上窜红的文体家,“这种东西和咖啡屋里的闲谈相差无几，但和书信相差甚远。它们不用储存保留，而是要删除遗忘。”许多网络 公告内设“实况”计时系统，利用计算机系统中基本的文字处理器，这类公告以分钟收费，往往一小时后不给提示就自动关闭。6. 这并不是说，所有的网络作家多花一点时间都能生产出惊世之作。网上许多小说和诗歌都属二流水平或者更差，这倒并不足为怪，因为入这行的门槛太低了。“在现实世界中，”芝加哥诗人玛丽安妮穆罕拉吉说，“文学作品要出版，要做非常辛勤的劳动，这自然就剔除了大量的垃圾。而在网络世界，区区几次按键就可以将自己的作品发给成千上万的读者。”7.但是尽管劣质诗歌充斥泛滥，网络上仍有珍宝可寻。以笔名“记忆术”发贴的华盛顿律师迈克戈德温讲述了乔格林的故事。格林是克雷公司的技术文档撰写人员，他通过犀利地批评在一个名为“娱乐艺术诗”讨论组上发现的诗作，将这个行将湮灭的讨论组变成了名符其实的诗歌创作工作坊。这触怒了一些人。他们说，如果他是个诗神，为什么不在组内发表自己的诗作？”戈德温回忆说，“他不但发表了自己的诗作，而且把他们彻底镇住了。”还有格林的缘定明尼苏达，一部记录他与一位网 络写手会面的仿史诗作品，则成了互联网上备受尊崇的经典之作。该书开篇写道：“实际上我去见马克的时候，打扮得像坎特伯雷故事集中的人物。您一定认为这太难了，但我想 给