【正文】 y on a Jet Ski. 3對我來說，像對其他人也一樣，網(wǎng)絡(luò)已經(jīng)成為了一種通用的媒介，大部分信息都通過這個渠道進(jìn)人我們的眼、耳，最后進(jìn)人我們的大腦。能從這樣一個異常豐富的信息庫中直接獲取信息，其優(yōu)點(diǎn)是很多的，而且也得到了廣泛的描述和適當(dāng)?shù)馁澴u(yù)?！肮璐鎯ζ鞯耐昝烙洃浶?，”《連線》雜志的克萊夫 湯普森寫道，“對于思想來說是一個大實(shí)惠。”但是這個實(shí)惠是要付出代價的。(此文來自袁勇兵博客)就像媒體理論家馬歇爾 麥克盧恩在上世紀(jì)60年代所指出的那樣，媒體可不只是被動的信息渠道。它們不但提供了思想的源泉，也塑造了思想的進(jìn)程。網(wǎng)絡(luò)似乎粉碎了我專注與沉思的能力?，F(xiàn)如今，我的腦袋就盼著以網(wǎng)絡(luò)提供信息的方式來獲取信息:飛快的微粒運(yùn)動。曾經(jīng)我是文字海洋中的潛水者，現(xiàn)在我則像是摩托艇騎手在海面上風(fēng)馳電掣。 ’m not the only I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintancesliterary types, most of themmany say they39。re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. I was a lit major in college, and used to be a voracious book reader, he wrote. What happened He speculates on the answer: What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, . I39。m just seeking convenience, but because the way I think has changed 4我并不是唯一一個有此感覺的人。當(dāng)我向文學(xué)界的朋友和熟人提到我在閱讀方面的困擾，許多人說他們也有同樣的感受。他們上網(wǎng)越多，在閱讀長文章時，就越難集中精力。我所關(guān)注的一些博主也提到了類似的現(xiàn)象。斯科特 卡普開了一個有關(guān)在線媒體的博客，最近他承認(rèn)自己已經(jīng)完全不讀書了。 “我大學(xué)讀的是文學(xué)專業(yè)，曾經(jīng)是一個嗜書如命的人，”他寫道?！暗降装l(fā)生了什么事呢 ”他推測出了一個答案:“如果對我來說，通過網(wǎng)絡(luò)來閱讀的真正理由與其說是我的閱讀方式發(fā)生了改變，比如，我只是圖個方便，不如說是我的思維方式在發(fā)生變化，那么我該怎么辦呢 ” Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of puters in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print, he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his ment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a staccato quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. I can39。t read War and Peace anymore,he admitted I39。ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraph is too much to absorb. I skim it. 5布魯斯 弗里德曼經(jīng)常撰寫有關(guān)電腦在醫(yī)學(xué)領(lǐng)域應(yīng)用的文章。他在早些時候同樣提到因特網(wǎng)如何改變了他的思維習(xí)慣。“稍長些的文章，不管是網(wǎng)上的還是已經(jīng)出版的，我現(xiàn)在幾乎已經(jīng)完全喪失了閱讀它們的能力。”在密歇根大學(xué)醫(yī)學(xué)院長期任教的病理學(xué)家布魯斯，弗里德曼在電話里告訴我，由于上網(wǎng)快速瀏覽文章的習(xí)慣，他的思維呈現(xiàn)出一種“碎讀”特性?！拔以僖沧x不了《戰(zhàn)爭與和平》了?！备ダ锏侣姓J(rèn)，“我失去了這個本事。即便是一篇長達(dá)三四段的博客也難以消化。我只能略微瀏覽一下。” alone don39。t prove much. And we still await the longterm neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how the Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the fiveyear research program, the scholars examined puter logs39。 documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a UK educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, ebooks, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited a form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they39。d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would bounce out to another site. Sometimes they39。d save a long article, but there39。s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. 6僅僅是趣聞軼事還不能證明什么。我們?nèi)栽诘却L期的神經(jīng)學(xué)和心理學(xué)的實(shí)驗(yàn)，這將給因特網(wǎng)如何影響到我們的認(rèn)識一個權(quán)威的定論。倫敦大學(xué)學(xué)院的學(xué)者做了一個網(wǎng)絡(luò)研讀習(xí)慣的研究并發(fā)表了研究結(jié)果。該研究指出，我們可能已經(jīng)徹底置身于閱讀與思考方式的巨變之中了。作為五年研究計劃的一部分，學(xué)者們檢測了計算機(jī)日志，它跟蹤記錄了兩個流行的搜索網(wǎng)站的用戶行為。其中一個網(wǎng)站是英國圖書館的，另一個是英國教育社團(tuán)的，他們提供了期刊論文、電子書以及其他一些文獻(xiàn)資源。他們發(fā)現(xiàn)，人們上網(wǎng)時呈現(xiàn)出“一種浮光掠影般的形式”，總是從一個資源跳到另一個資源，并且很少返回他們之前訪問過的資源。他們常常還沒讀完一兩頁文章或書籍，就“彈”出來轉(zhuǎn)到另一個網(wǎng)頁去了。有時候他們會保存一個篇幅長的文章，但沒有任何證據(jù)表明他們曾經(jīng)返回去認(rèn)真閱讀。 to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it39。s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinkingperhaps even a new sense of the self.39。 We are not only what we read, says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, We are howwe read. Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts efficiency and immediacy above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and plex works of prose monplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to bee mere decoders of information. Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. 7多虧鋪天蓋地的網(wǎng)絡(luò)文本，更別說當(dāng)下時興的手機(jī)短信，可供我們閱讀的東西很可能比上世紀(jì)七八十年代要多了，那時，我們選擇的媒體還是電視。但是，這已是另一種閱讀模式，背后隱藏的是另一種思考方式—也許甚至是一種全新的自我意識?！安粌H閱讀的內(nèi)容塑造了我們，”塔夫茨大學(xué)的發(fā)展心理學(xué)家、《普魯斯特與魷魚:閱讀思維的科學(xué)與故事》的作者瑪麗安娜 沃爾夫說，“閱讀方式也體現(xiàn)了我們自身。”沃爾夫擔(dān)憂，網(wǎng)絡(luò)所倡導(dǎo)的將“豐富”與“時效性”置于首位的閱讀方式可能已經(jīng)削弱了那種深度閱讀能力。深度閱讀能力的形成應(yīng)歸功于早期印刷術(shù)的發(fā)明，有了它，長而復(fù)雜的散文作品也相當(dāng)普遍了。然而，她說，當(dāng)我們在線閱讀時，我們往往只是一“信息解碼器”而已。我們對文句的設(shè)釋，心無旁鶩、深度閱讀時形成的豐富的精神聯(lián)系，這些能力很大程度上已經(jīng)消失了。 , explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It39。s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the ci