Our Favorite Headlines of 2010 Part 4英文电子资料.pdfVIP

Our Favorite Headlines of 2010 From disasters to honey traps, from WikiLeaks to Hezbollah hotties, FPs covered it all, our way. DECEMBER 30, 2010 Think Again: The Internet They told us it would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong. BY EVGENY MOROZOV | MAY/JUNE 2010 The Internet Has Been a Force for Good No. In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village. Writing in 1994, a group of digital aficionados led by Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler published a manifesto modestly subtitled A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age that promised the rise of electronic neighborhoods bound together not by geography but by shared interests. Nicholas Negroponte, then the famed head of the MIT MediaLab, dramaticallypredicted in 1997 that the Internet would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace. Well, the Internet as we know it has now been around for two decades, and it has certainly been transformative. The amount of goods and services available online is staggering. Communicating across borders is simpler than ever: Hefty international phone bills have been replaced by inexpensive subscriptions to Skype, while Google Translate helps readers navigate Web pages in Spanish, Mandarin, Maltese, and more than 40 other languages. But just as earlier generations were disappointed to see that neither the telegraph nor the radio delivered on the world-changing promises made by their most ardent cheerleaders, we havent seen an Internet -powered rise in global peace, love, and liberty. And were not likely to. Many of the transnational networks fostered by the Internet arguably worsen -- rather than improv