高考英语话题阅读素材：Unit72E-mailIsHeretoStay.docVIP

Unit 72　　E-mail Is Here to Stay　　Is e-mail a blessing or a curse? Last month, after a weeks vacation, I discovered 1,218 unread e-mail messages waiting in my inbox. I pretended to be dismayed, but secretly I was pleased. This is how we measure our wired worth in the late 1990s -- if you arent overwhelmed by e-mail, you must be doing something wrong. Never mind that after subtracting the stale office chitchat and dumb jokes forwarded by my friends who should know better, there were 7 messages actually worth reading. I was doomed to spend half my workday just deleting junk.　　E-mail. Cant live with it, cant live without it. Artists, advertisers and freedom fighters, lovers and sworn enemies -- theyve all turned to e-mail as they would to any new medium of expression. E-mail is convenient, saves time, brings us closer to one another, helps us manage our ever-more-complex lives. Books are written, campaigns conducted, crimes committed -- all via e-mail. But it is also inconvenient, wastes our time, isolates us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity into our lives. To some, e-mail is just the latest chapter in the evolving his story of human communication.　　Yet e-mail -- and all online communication -- is something different; it captures the essence of life at the close of the 20th century with an authority that few other products of digital technology can claim. E-mail simultaneously allows us to cope with that acceleration and contributes to it. Are our attention spans shortening under attacks of new, improved forms of stimulation? If we accept that the creation of the global-spanning Internet is one of the most important technological innovations over past 500 years, then we must give e-mail -- the living embodiment of human connection across the Net. The way we interact with people is changing; e-mail is both the catalyst and the instrument of that change.　　It may even help us find those whom we want love in the first place. E-mail encourages th