Unit 2 Bards of the Internet 课文翻译

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2024年4月26日发(作者：)

Unit 2

Bards of the Internet

Phillip Elmer-Dewitt

1. 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 what’s 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. They’re not to have and hold; they’re 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

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