高英课文：BardsOftheInternet最新分析和总结.pdfVIP

《Bards Of the Internet 》 By Philip Elmer-DeWitt 1. One of the unintended side effects of the invention of the telephone was that writing went out of style. Oh, sure, there were still full-time scribblers -- journalists, academics, professional wordsmiths. And the great centers of commerce still found it useful to keep on hand people who could draft a memo, a brief, a press release or a contract. But given a choice between picking up a pen or a phone, most folks took the easy route and gave their fingers -- and sometimes their mind -- a rest. 2. Which makes whats happening on the computer networks all the more startling. Every night, when they should be watching television, millions of computer users sit down at their keyboards; dial into CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or the Internet; and start typing -- E-mail, bulletin-board postings, chat messages, rants, diatribes, even short stories and poems. Just when the media of McLuhanwere supposed to render obsolete the mediumof Shakespeare, the online world is experiencing the greatest boom in letter writing since the 18th century. 3. It is my overwhelming belief that E-mail and computer conferencing is teaching an entire generation about the flexibility and utility of prose, writes Jon Carroll, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, compares electronic bulletin boards with the scribblers compacts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in which memberspassed letters from hand to hand, adding a little more at each turn. David Sewell, an associate editor at the Univer