那些不堪回首的“网”事.docVIP

那些不堪回首的“网”事 　　人的记忆有限，这样的设定必然有其道理，毕竟有许多事我们不愿想起，宁愿它们随风而逝。然而，互联网的出现打破了这一默契，在帮助我们记录美好过往的同时，也将那些不堪回首的经历一并记录了下来。在搜索引擎不断进化的时代，一不小心，过去的自己可能就会出现在你的面前。这场毫无防备的邂逅带来的也许是甜蜜，但更多时候，则可能是尴尬、窘迫甚至麻烦。 　　My first week of grad school， a few of my new peers already knew me by my publication record. I wasn’t a prodigy1）： My writing hadn’t appeared in some prestigious scholarly journal. Instead， they’d Googled their way to an essay I’d written almost a decade before， one in which I enthusiastically declared my love for playing Dungeons Dragons2） in the young adult section of my local public library. （And no， I’m not linking to it for you.） 　　I don’t think they’d looked hard： It was easy to find at the time， a bright beacon of shame on the first page of my Google results. But imagine my embarrassment when I realized that this was their first impression of me. As future English professors， they read it with care， calling out adolescent quirks3） of word choice and syntax4） that I would have rather left behind. I never quite lived it down5）， if only because6） I imagined that my colleagues never forgot. 　　To be clear， though， Dungeons Dragons itself wasn’t the problem. I still play， I still love libraries， and I don’t care who knows. To the contrary， it was my youthful sincerity that ate at7） me. Free of cynicism and guile， my prose read like the work of another writer. It marked me as a fraud， a wholly different creature from the urbane8） sophisticate I wanted so badly to be. Think of that moment when your parents insist on showing baby pictures to your latest partner. Even as they coo9）， you can feel your face flush， unable to reconcile this hapless10） earlier version of yourself with the mature facade you’ve long since erected. This is why the telltale11） traces of all our pasts sometimes fill us with shame， even when they’re not particularly shameful. 　　In the age of Google， intrusions of personal history into present reality have become more common―and more unpredictable―than ever