Unit 4
Text A
We’ve got mail ---Always
梦见血好不好
Is e-mail a blessing or a cur?Last month ,after a week’s vacation.I discovered 1218unread e-mail messages waiting in my IN box. I pretend to be dismayed,but cretly I was plead. This is how we messure our wired worth in the late 1900s—if you are not overwhelmed by e-mail. You must be doing something wrong..
Never mind that after subtracting the stale office chitchat ,spam,flame wars,dumb jokes forward by friends who should have known better and other e-mail detritus.there were perhaps ven messages actually worth reading .I was doomed to spend half my workday just deleting junk E-mail sucks.
探病 But wait –what about tho ven? A clo friend in Taipei I haven’t en in five years tells me he’s planning to start a family. A complete stranger in Belgium nds me a hot st
和时间赛跑作文ory tip.Another stranger offers me a job. I’d rather lo an eye than lo my e-mail account .E-mail rocks.
E-mail.can’t live with it.can’t live without it.Con artists and real artists, advertirs and freedom fighters,lovers and sworn enemies---they’ve all flocked to e-mail as they would to any new medium og expression.E-mail is convenient,save time,brings us clor to one another,help us manage our ever-more comples 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.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 uncoverd the same sin by finding letters a generation ago.
伤筋
Yet e-mail---and all online communication—is in fact something truly different,it capture the esnce od life at the clo of the 20th century with an authority that few other products of digital technology can claim.Does the pace of life em ever faster?E-mail si
multaneously allows us to cope with the 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 tho who ability to contrate is measured in nanoconds.if we accept that the creation of the globe-spanning Internet is one of the most important technological innovations of the last half of this century. Then we must give a 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.
历史著作
The scope of the phenomenon is mind-boggling.worldwide,225milion people can nd and receive e-mail.Forget about the Web or e-commerce or even online porography.e-mail is the internet’s true killer app-the sofeware application that we simply must have .even if means buying a $2000 computer and plunkding down $20 a month to American Online.
Oddly enough, no one planned it, and no one predicted it. When rearch scientists first
began tomatocooking 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 nd 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 ems that what all tho top computer scientists really wanted to u 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 t out originally to change the world. As a systems administrator at UC Berkeley in the late 70s, he was constantly hassled by computer-science rearchers in one building who wanted to get their e-mail from machines in another location. “I just wanted to make my life easier,” says Allman.
调经中药配方 Don’t we all? When my first child was born in 1994, e-mail emed 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 hou; 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 mylf in the middle of a bitter fight with my mother— on e-mail. Again, new medium, old story.
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 worning ca of Parkinson’s dia. 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 nd him e-mail. She grasped, long before the Internet became a houhold word, how online communication offered new possibilities for transcending physical limitations, how as simple a thing as e-mail could bring us clor to tho whom we love.
It may even help us find tho whom we want to love in the first place.Jenn Shreve is
竹芋叶子干枯卷曲
a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area who keeps a clo eye on the emerging culture of the new online generation. For the last couple of years, she’s en what she considers to be a positive change in online dating habits. E-mail, she argues, encourages the shy. “It offers a mi-risk-free environment to initiate romance,” says Shreve. “Becau it lacks the immediate threat of physical rejection, people who are perhaps shy or had painful romantic failures in the past can u the Internet as a way to build a relationship in the early romantic stages.”
But it’s not just about lust. E-mail also flattens hierarchies within the bounds of an 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 rves as a buffer zone.”
