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第八单元 Unit8
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Text A The Internet? Bah! After two decades online, I'm puzzled. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is on online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice is heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles Citizens' Band Radio, complete with handles, harassment and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Trying reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.
Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County , N. Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen. Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software. Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames—but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life. Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interaction are relentlessly devalued. Text Ｂ Chat Room How-ToChat room communities have become more structured as the Internet has evolved. Many rooms have sets of rules and guidelines, often unofficial, by which users are expected to abide. Maintain proper etiquette when chatting to ensure an enjoyable and flame-free experience.
Steps: 1. Find out whether a particular chat room has its own FAQ (frequently asked questions) section before you enter. If it does, review the FAQ section for specific etiquette guidelines. 2. Introduce yourself when you enter a room by typing your age and gender. In some rooms, a general location, such as your state, is also appropriate to mention. 3. If you want to address an individual in the room without sending an instant message, introduce your statement or question with the person's screen name and a colon or hyphen (for example, 'SportsFan: What's your favorite football team?'). 4. Avoid referring to users by their real names. 5. Allow all users to make comments and ask questions. Don't try to take control of the room by flooding it with your own entries. 6. Avoid direct confrontations with rude users. Report disruptive users to the chat host if a host is available. Otherwise, leave the chat room. 7. Don't harass other users with threats, unwanted sexual comments or anything else that might make them uncomfortable.
Tips:
Warnings: 语法： |
uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. 
What the Internet provides won't tell you is that the Internet is an ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editor, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “ Too many connections, try again later.” 
Some chat rooms offer you the option of blocking out messages and chat room entries from specific users. This feature is a good alternative to abandoning the room or getting the chat host involved. 
To get a feel for how a chat room operates, try "lurking" - observing the room without making any entries - for a while before offering your own comments. 
Don't type the same sentence, word or phrase into the chat room over and over again. This is called "scrolling" and is heavily frowned upon by chat room users and hosts. 
Listening