positive change in online dating habits. E-mail, she argues, encourages the shy. “It offers a semi-risk-free environment to initiate romance,” says Shreve. “Because it lacks the immediate threat of physical rejection, people who are perhaps shy or had painful romantic failures in the past can use the Internet as a way to build a relationship in the early romantic stages.”
它甚至可以一下子帮我们找到我们想爱的人。简恩·希瑞夫是旧金山海湾地区的自由作家，她一直关注新的网络一代的新兴文化。最近几年，她看到了网络约会习惯发生了积极的变化。她认为，电子邮件鼓励那些害羞的人。“它创造了一种半无风险的环境，方便制造浪漫，”希瑞夫说道，“因为它没有直接的生理拒绝的威胁，害羞的人们或者过去曾有过惨痛经历的人可以使用因特网建立早期的浪漫关系。”
But it’s not just about lust. E-mail also flattens hierarchies within the bounds of an office. It is far easier, Shreve notes, to make a suggestion to your superiors and colleagues via e-mail than it is to do so in a pressure-filled meeting room. “Any time when you have something that is difficult to say, e-mail can make it easier,” she says. “It serves as a buffer zone. ”
但这并不只是欲望而已。电子邮件也使得办公室里的等级观念变淡。希瑞夫注意到，通过电子邮件向你的上级和同事提意见要比在压力重重的会议室里简单得多。“任何时候，当你觉得有什么事情难以开口，电子邮件总能化繁为简。”她说，“它就像一个缓冲带。”
Of course, e-mail’s uses as a social lubricant can be taken to extremes. There is little point in denying the obvious dark side to the lack of self-constraint encouraged by e-mail. Purveyors of
pornography rarely call us on the phone and suggest out loud that we check out some “hot teen action.” But they don’t think twice about jamming our e-mail boxes full of outrageously prurient advertisements. People who would never insult us face to face will spew the vilest, most objectionable, most appalling rhetoric imaginable via e-mail or an instant message, or in the no-holds-barred confines of a chat room.
当然，把电子邮件作为一种社会润滑剂也有极端的一面。不容否认电邮由于缺乏自我控制而带来明显的负面影响。色情传播者几乎从来不打电话大声宣传说我们去访问一些“少年色情行为”。但是他们会不假思索地用大量赤裸裸的淫秽广告塞满我们的电子邮箱。从来不当面攻击我们的人会通过电子邮件或是即时消息，或是在毫无限制的聊天室内宣泄最卑鄙，最令人反感，最令人惊骇的言辞。
Cyberspace’s lapses in gentility underscores a central
contradiction inherent in online communication. If it is true that hours spent on the Net are often hours subtracted from watching television, one could argue that the digital era has raised the curtains on a new age of literacy — more people are writing more words than ever before! But what kind of words are we writing? Are we really more literate, or are we sliding ever faster into a quicksand of meaningless irrelevance, of pop-cultural triviality — expressed, usually, in lowercase letters — run amok? E-mail is actually too easy, too casual. Gone are the days when one would worry over a letter to a lover or a relative or a colleague. Now there’s just time for that quick e-mail, a few hastily cobbled together thoughts written in a colloquial style that usually borders on unedited stream of consciousness. The danger is obvious, snippy comments to a friend, overly sharp retorts to One’s boss, insults mistakenly sent to the target, not the intended audience. E-mail allows us to act before we can think — the perfect tool for a culture of hyperstimulation.
电脑空间的文明丧失折射出网络通讯的内在矛盾。如果说花在网络上的时间是从看电视这里分出来的，那么可以认为数字时代揭开了文化教育的新时代——更多的人要比以往写更多的字！但是我们在写怎样的文字啊？我们是不是变得更加有文化，还是我们只是更快地陷入了毫无意义的文字，以及流行文化的琐碎的陷阱——往往是用小写字母书写，四处横行的电子邮件往往太过于简单、随意。人们会担心情书、家书，或者给同事的书信中的一个字母的时代已经一去不复返。现在的时代，电子邮件往往是草草书写，用口语的方式表达思想，可以说简直就是未加编辑的意识流文字。危险是显而易见的：对朋友无礼的评论，对老板过于尖锐的反驳，对错误的目标发起攻击。电子邮件使得我们会不假思索采取行动——正是超级刺激时代的完美工具。
So instead of creating something new, we forward something old. Instead of crafting the perfect phrase, we use a brain-dead abbreviation, IMHO for In My Humble Opinion, or ROTFLMAO, for Rolling On The Floor Laughing My A-Off. Got a rumor? E-mail it to 50 people! Instant messaging and chat rooms just accentuate the casual negative. If e-mail requires little thought, then instant messaging — flashing a message directly onto a recipient’s computer monitor — is so insubstantial as to be practically nonexistent.
因此，我们其实抄送了一些陈旧的事物而不是创造了新兴的事物。我们没有创造出完美的词藻，相反，我们使用不经过大脑思考的缩写：用IMHO 指代 In my humble opinion （依我拙见），或者 ROTFLMAO 代表rolling on the floor laughing my A-off （在地上笑得打滚）。听到什么谣言？发给50个人！即时信息和聊天室只是加重了这种负面影响。如果电子邮件让人们不假思索，那么即
时信息——直接出现在接收者电脑屏幕上的信息——是如此的无实质性，简直可以被视作不存在。
E-mail, ultimately, is a fragile thing, easy to forge, easy to corrupt, easy to destroy. A few weeks ago a coworker of mine accidentally and irretrievably wiped out 1, 500 of his own saved messages. For a person who conducts the bulk of his life online, such a digital tragedy is akin to erasing part of your own memory. Suddenly, nothing’s left. It is comforting to think that, if preserved in a retrievable way, all the notes the world is passing back and forth today constitute a vast historical archive, but the opposite may also be true. Earlier this summer, I visited some curators at the Stanford University Library who are hard at work compiling a digital archive of Silicon Valley history. They bemoaned a new, fast-spreading corporate policy that requires the deletion of all corporate e-mails after every 60 or 90 days. As Microsoft and Netscape have learned to their dismay, old e-mails,however trivial they seem when they are written, can and will come back to haunt you. It is best, say the lawyers, to just wipe them all out.
电子邮件归根结底是脆弱的，很容易作假，容易篡改，容易破坏。几周之前我的同事不小心也不可逆转地删除了他保存的1500条信息。对于一个将大部分时间用作上网的人来说，这不啻于抹去了你部分的记忆。突然之间，一无所有。这样想可能会有所安慰，如果都用可以逆转的方式保存，那么所有的今天在世上传递的信息构成了巨大的历史档案，但是反过来可能也是正确的。近年夏天早些时候，我拜访了斯坦福大学图书馆的一些馆长，他们正努力编撰一部硅谷历史的电子档案。他们哀叹一条新的迅速推广的公司政策，即要求每过60天或90天必须删除所有的公司电子邮件。微软和网景之后沮丧地发现，旧的电子邮件无论当时多么不起眼，都能够也将会来骚扰你。律师说，最好还是把它们都删掉。
Still, e-mail is enabling radically new forms of worldwide human collaboration. Those 225 million people who can send and receive it represent a network of potentially cooperating individuals dwarfing anything that even the mightiest corporation or government can muster. Mailing-list discussion groups and online conferencing allow us to gather together to work on a multitude of projects that are interesting or helpful to us — to pool our collective efforts in a fashion never before possible. The most obvious place to see this collaboration right now is in the world of software. For decades, programmers have used e-mail to collaborate on projects. With increasing frequency, this collaboration is occurring across company lines, and often without even the spur of commercial incentives. It’s happening largely because it can — it’s relatively easy for a thousand programmers to collectively contribute to a project using e-mail and the Internet. Perhaps each individual contribution is small, but the scale of the Internet multiplies all efforts dramatically.
然而，电子邮件很大地促成了全球人类的合作。那些可以收发电子邮件的2亿2千5百万人代表了一个相互合作的网络，任何最强大的公司或者政府可以召集的力量都难以与其相比。邮件发送清单讨论小组和在线会议使我们可以一起合作，完成许多有意思或是对我们有帮助的项目——以前所未有的方式将我们集体的努力凝聚在一起。现在最明显可以看到这种合作的地方就是软件业。几十年来，程序员已经使用电子邮件在项目上进行合作。随着使用频率越来越高，这种合作正跨越公司的界限，往往没有商业的动机。之所以会这样，主要是因为它可以——1000名程序员一起使用电子邮件和因特网合作一个项目往往相对容易。也许每一个个体的贡献是微不足道的，但是因特网的规模让个体的贡献可以几何级的放大。
Meanwhile, now that we are all connected, day and night, across time zones and oceans and corporate firewalls, we are beginning to lose sight of the distinction between what is work and what is play.
与此同时，我们现在都联系在了一起，日日夜夜，跨越时区、大洋、公司的防火墙，我们开始看不清工作和娱乐之间的界限。
Six years after I logged onto CompuServe for the first time, I went to Australia for three weeks. Midway through my visit, I ended up in Alice Springs, a fraying-at-the-edges frontier town about a thousand miles away from anywhere in the middle of the great Australian outback. An exotic place, nestled among the oldest mountain remnants of the world, where flocks of parrots swoop and flutter through the downtown shopping district. But instead of wandering through the desert seeking out wallabies and feral camels, I found myself dialing long distance to a friend’s University of Melbourne Internet account, and transferring from there via a telnet program to my own account at the Well in San Francisco. Once on the Well, I checked my mail to see if a fact checker for Wired magazine had any fresh queries for me concerning a story I had recently submitted. 我首次登录 Compuserve 6年之后，我去澳大利亚待了三周。时间过半的时候，我在爱丽丝泉，一座位于澳洲内地的前沿小镇，离任何地方都有千里之遥。这是一个很独特的地方，在世界上最老的山脉中，当地成群的鹦鹉在镇中心购物区扑腾。我没有徜徉在沙漠中寻找小袋鼠和野生骆驼，恰恰相反，我发现我在拨长途试图登录我朋友的墨尔本大学的因特网账户，通过一个远程登录程序转到我在旧金山的威尔士自己的账户。当我登录之后，我查了邮件，看看Wired杂志的事实核查员是否对我最近投的一则故事有什么新的问题。