unit4

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Is e-mail a blessing or a curse? Last month, after a week’s vacation, I discovered 1, 218 unread e-mail messages waiting in my in box. I pretended to be dismayed, but secretly I was pleased. This is how we measure our wired worth in the late 1990s — if you aren’t overwhelmed by e-mail, you must be doing something wrong.

电子邮件究竟是福是祸？上个月在度假一周之后，我发现我的收件箱里有1218封未读邮件。我假装很沮丧，但是私底下却很愉快。这就是我们在90年代末期衡量自己的联系价值的方式——如果你不能被电子邮件吞噬，那么你肯定出了什么问题。

Never mind that after subtracting the stale office chitchat, spam, flame wars, dumb jokes forwarded by friends who should have known better and other e-mail detritus, there were perhaps seven messages actually worth reading. I was doomed to spend half my workday just deleting junk. E-mail sucks.

如果除去那些无聊的办公室邮件、垃圾邮件、网络口水大战邮件，那些应该更进一步了解我的朋友抄送的沉闷的笑话，以及别的零星电子邮件，其实大概只剩下7封邮件值得一读。但我却注定要花半天的工作时间删除这些垃圾邮件。电子邮件太糟糕了。

But wait — what about those seven? A close friend in Taipei I haven’t seen in five years tells me he’s planning to start a family. A complete stranger in Belgium sends me a hot story tip. Another stranger offers me a job. I’d rather lose an eye than lose my e-mail account. E-mail rocks!

但是等一下，这7封邮件又怎么样呢？一位5年未见的在台北的好朋友告诉我他正准备组建家庭。比利时的一个陌生人发给我一个火爆故事的提示。另一个陌生人要给我一份工作。与失去我的电子邮件信箱相比，我宁可失去我的一只眼睛。电子邮件太棒了！

E-mail. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Con artists and real artists, advertisers and freedom fighters, lovers and sworn

enemies-they’ve all flocked to e-mail as they would to any new medium of expression. E-mail is convenient, saves time, brings us closer to one

another, helps us manage our ever-more-complex lives. Books are written, campaigns conducted, crimes committed — all via e-mail. But it is also inconvenient, wastes our time, isolates us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity into our already too-harried lives. To skeptics, e-mail

is just the latest chapter in the evolving history of human communication. A snooping husband now discovers his wife’s affair by reading her private e-mail — but he could have uncovered the same sin by finding letters a generation ago.

电子邮件让人难以忍受，却又无法离开。欺骗大师和艺术大师，广告商和自由斗士，爱人和宿敌都纷纷使用电子邮件作为新的表达工具。电子邮件方便、省时、拉近彼此距离，帮助我们经营我们日益复杂的生活。写书、运动、犯罪都可以通过电子邮件进行。但是电子邮件也很麻烦，浪费时间，让我们只面对电脑，彼此隔膜，让我们本已备受折磨的生活愈发复杂。对于怀疑论者，电子邮件只是人类交流演化史中的最近的篇章。一位爱管闲事的丈夫在阅读了他妻子私人电子邮件后发现了她的背叛，但是在上个年代，他也可以通过阅读书信发现这样的丑事。 Yet e-mail — and all online communication — is in fact something truly different; it captures the essence of life at the close of the 20th century with an authority that few other products of digital technology can claim. Does the pace of life seem ever faster? E-mail simultaneously allows us to cope with that acceleration and contributes to it. Are our attention spans shriveling under barrages of new, improved forms of stimulation? The quick and dirty e-mail is made to order for those whose ability to concentrate is measured in nanoseconds. If we accept that the creation of the globes-spanning Internet is one of the most important technological innovations of the last half of this century, then we must give e-mail — the living embodiment of human connection across the Net — pride of place. The way we interact with each other is

changing; e-mail is both the catalyst and the instrument of that change.

然而电子邮件——所有的网络通讯事实上是完全与众不同的；在20世纪末它抓住了生活的实质，有别的数码产品无法比拟的权威。我们的生活节奏是否在加快？电子邮件一方面让我们应对节奏的加速，另一方面又一手造成了这种加速。我们的注意力是否在众多新颖、改善的刺激之下难以为继？迅速涌现的垃圾邮件是给那些注意力可以用纳米秒来测量的人的。如果我们接受在全球扩张的因特网是最近半个世纪最重要的技术革新，那么我们必须要给电子邮件——网络上人类联系的活生生的证明——一个首要位置。我们彼此的互动方式正在发生变化，电子邮件是那种变化的催化剂和媒介。

The scope of the phenomenon is mind-boggling. Worldwide, 225 million people can send and receive e-mail. Forget about the Web or e-commerce

or even online pornography; e-mail is the Internet’s true killer app the software application that we simply must have, even if it means buying a $ 2,000 computer and plunking down $ 20 a month to America Online. According to Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University, one survey after another finds that when online users are asked what they do on the Net, “e-mail is always No. 1.”

这种现象的范围是令人难以想象的。全球有2亿2千5百万人可以收发电子邮件。忘记网络，或是电子商务，或是在线色情网站吧，电子邮件才是因特网真正的最佳应用程序——我们必须拥有的程序，即使这意味着要买2000美元一台的电脑，每月要付给美国在线20美元。根据多纳·霍夫曼，一位在范德比特大学的市场营销教授在一次又一次的调查之后发现，当受访者被问到他们上网是在做什么时，他们总是回答：“电子邮件总是排在第一。”

Oddly enough, no one planned it, and no one predicted it. When research scientists first began cooking up the Internet’s predecessor, the Arpanet, in 1968, their primary goal was to enable disparate computing centers to share resources. “But it didn’t take very long before they discovered that the most important thing was the ability to send mail around, which they had not anticipated at all,” says Eric Allman, chief technical officer of Sendmail, Inc., and the primary author of a

20-year-old program — Sendmail that still transports the vast majority of the world’s e-mail across the Internet. It seems that what all those top computer scientists really wanted to use the Internet for was as a place to debate, via e-mail, such crucially important topics as the best science-fiction novel of all time. Even though Allman is now quite proud that his software helps hundreds of millions of people communicate, he says he didn’t set out originally to change the world. As a systems administrator at DC Berkeley in the late ’70s, he was constantly hassled by computer science researchers in one building who wanted to get their email from machines in another location. “I just wanted to make my life easier,” says Allman.

令人费解的是，没有人计划过，也没有人预测过。当作研究的科学家在1968年一开始设计因特网的雏形ARPA 计算机网的时候，他们的主要目的是让互不联系的运算中心能够共享资源。“但是不久以后他们发现最重要的其实是能够到处发信的能力，他们其实事先根本没有预见到”，Sendmail公司的首席技术官恩里克·奥曼说道，他本人也有20年是Sendmail这个程序的主要编写人员，这个软件今天仍然在因特网上传输大量的邮件。似乎那些顶尖的计算机科学家真正希望使因特网成为一个通过电子邮件，供大家争论一些重要话题的地方，如同一直以来的一个科幻小说温床一样。虽然奥曼现在很自豪，他的软件帮助数亿人沟通，他说他一开始并没有打算改变世界。在70年代他是加州大学伯克利分校的系统管理员，那里的计算机科学研究员时常要麻烦他，要让他帮忙从另一个地点的机器里收取他们的电子邮件。“我只是想让我的生活轻松点。”奥曼说道。

Don’t we all? When my first child was born in 1994, email seemed to me some kind of Promethean gift perfectly designed

to help me cope with the irreconcilable pressures of new fatherhood and full-time freelance writing. It saved me time and money without ever requiring me to leave the house; it salvaged my social life, allowed me to conduct interviews as a reporter and kept a lifeline open to my far-flung extended family. Indeed, I finally knew for sure that the digital world was viscerally potent when I found myself in the middle of a bitter fight with my mother — on e-mail. Again, new medium, old story. 我们又何尝不想呢？当我的第一个孩子在1994年出生的时候，电子邮件对我来说似乎就像普罗米修斯的礼物，刚好帮我应对了初为人父和全职自由撰稿人之间不可调和的压力。它帮我省下了时间和金钱，我都不用走出家门；它拯救了我的社交生活，允许我作为一名记者进行采访，又能够让我同远隔千山万水的大家庭联系。的确，我终于确信当我在同我母亲进行一场电子邮件苦战的时候，数字世界是强有力的。同样，新的媒体，老的故事。

My mother had given me an e-mail head start. In 1988, she bought me a modem so I could create a CompuServe account. The reason? Her younger brother had contracted a

rapidly worsening case of Parkinson’s disease. He wasn’t able to talk clearly, and could hardly scrawl his name with a pen or pencil. But he had a computer, and could peck out words on a keyboard. My mom figured that if the family all had CompuServe accounts, we could send him e-mail. She grasped, long before the Internet became a household word, how online communication offered new possibilities for transcending physical

limitations, how as simple a thing as email could bring us closer to those whom we love.

我的母亲是我使用电子邮件的启蒙者。1988年，她给我买了一个调制解调器，我创建了Compuserve 账户，为什么呢？她的弟弟帕金森症恶化了。他不能清楚地说话，几乎连名字都不能写了。但是他有一台电脑，能够在键盘上打字。我母亲认为，如果所有的家庭成员都有Compuserve 的账户，我们就可以给他写电子邮件。她可谓是很久之前就了解因特网会成为家庭常用词，了解在线联络可以如何穿越生理限制，简单的电子邮件可以如何拉近我们与我们所爱的人之间的距离。

It may even help us find those whom we want to love in the first place. Jenn Shreve is a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area who keeps a close eye on the emerging culture of the new online generation. For the last couple of years, she’s seen what she considers to be a