新Unit 5- Is Google Making Us Stupid.doc

Internet: absolute communication , absolute isolation Is Google Making Us Stupid? 1. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. 1. 在过去的几年里，我总有一种坐立不安的感觉，觉得好像什么人或什么东西正在修理我的大脑，重新布局我的神经回路，然后重新安排了我的记忆。我的思想没有消失（目前为止我暂时可以这样讲），但却在发生变化。我不再像过去那样思考。这种感觉在我读书时尤为强烈。在过去，将自己沉浸于一本书或一篇长篇文章中是一件轻而易举的事。我的思维会被文章的叙事描写与论证的峰回路转所吸引，常常花几个小时在一篇篇长篇大论的散文间流连忘返。然而，这样的经历已经越来越少了。如今，刚翻过两三页书，我就开始心不在焉。我变得烦躁不安，找不到头绪，总是想做其他的事。我感觉自己好像总是得把不听话的大脑强行拉回到书本中。以往自然而然地静心潜读在现在已然变成了一场斗争。 2. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’ reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperli