当代研究生英语读写教程16单元课文原文.doc

Cyberspace: If You Dont Love It, Leave ItSomething in the American psyche loves new frontiers. we hanker after wide-open spaces￡? we like to explore￡? we like to make rules but refuse to follow them. But in this age its hard to find a place where you can go and be yourself without worrying about the neighbors.There is such a place: cyberspace. Formerly a playground for computer fans,cyberspace now embraces every conceivable constituency: schoolchildren, flirtatious singles, Hungarian-americans, accountants. Can they all get along? Or will our fear of kids surfing for dirty pictures behind their bedroom doors provoke a crackdown?The first order of business is to grasp what cyberspace is. It might help to leave behind metaphors of highways and frontiers and to think instead of real estate. Real estate, remember, is an intellectual, legal, artificial environment constructed on top of land. Real estate recognizes the difference between parkland and shopping mall, between red-light zone and school district, between church , state and drugstore.In the same way, you could think of cyberspace as a giant and unbounded world of virtual real estate. Some property is privately owned and rented out￡? other property is common land￡? some places are suitable for children, and others are best avoided by all citizens. Unfortunately, its those places that are now capturing the popular imagination, places that offer bomb-making instructions, pornography, advice on how to steal credit cards. They make cyberspace sound like a nasty place. Good citizens jump to a conclusion: better regulate it.But before using regulations to counter indecency it is fundamental to interpret the nature of cyberspace. Cyberspace isnt a frontier where wicked people can grab unsuspecting children, nor is it a giant television system that can beam offensive messages at unwilling viewers. In the kind of real estate, users have to choose where they visit, what they see, what they do. Its optional. In other