Unit 2 Bards of the Internet 课文翻译.doc
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1、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
2、 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
3、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
4、. 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 fl
5、exibility 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
6、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 har
7、k 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 muc
8、h 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
9、-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 cons
10、idered 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.Tha
11、t 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
12、 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
13、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 h
14、e 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 a
15、s 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
16、. “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 Capil
17、ano 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 th
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