填空题
A man wakes up in a New York apartment, brews coffee and goes out into the world, and everything that can appear on a smartphone or iPad appears before his eyes instead: weather reports, calendar reminders, messages from friends, his girlfriend"s smiling face. This is the promise of Google"s Project Glass. Even if the project itself never comes to fruition, though, the preview video deserves a life of its own, as a window into what our era promises and what it threatens to take away.
On the one hand, the video is a testament to modern technology"s extraordinary feats—not only instant communication across continents, but also an almost god-like access to information about the world around us. But the video also captures the sense of isolation that coexists with our technological mastery. The Man in the Google Glasses lives alone, in a drab, impersonal apartment. He has a significant other, but she"s far enough away that when sunset arrives, he climbs up on a roof and shares it with her via Video, while she grins from a window at the bottom of his field of vision.
He is, in other words, a characteristic 21st-century American, more electronically networked but more personally isolated than ever before. As the N. Y. U. sociologist Eric Klinenberg notes in
Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,
there are now more Americans living by themselves than there are Americans in intact nuclear-family households. And friendship, too, seems to be attenuating: a 2006 Duke University study found that Americans reported having, on average, three people with whom they discussed important issues in 1985, but just two by the mid-2000s.
The question hanging over the future of American social life, then, is whether all the possibilities of virtual community can make up for the weakening of flesh-and-blood ties and the decline of traditional communal institutions.
The optimists say yes. If you believe writers like Clay Shirky, author of 2008"s
Here Comes Everybody,
the buzzing hive mind of the Internet is well on its way to generating a kind of "cognitive surplus," which promises to make group interactions even more effective and enriching than they were before the Web.
The pessimists, on the other hand, worry that online life offers only an illusion of community. In
Alone Together
, Sherry Turkle argues that the lure of Internet relationships, constantly available but inherently superficial, might make both genuine connection and genuine solitude impossible.
Seeing the world through the eyes of the Man in the Google Glasses, though, suggests a more political reason for pessimism. In his classic 1953 work,
The Quest for Community
, the sociologist Robert Nisbet argued that in eras of intense individualism and weak communal ties, an atomized, rootless population is more likely to embrace authoritarian ideologies, and more likely to seek the protection of an omnicompetent state.
Today, social media are hailed for empowering dissidents and undercutting tyrannies around the world. Yet it"s hard not to watch the Google video and agree with
Forbes
"s Kashmir Hill when she suggests that such a technology could ultimately "accelerate the arrival of the persistent and pervasive citizen surveillance state," in which everything you see and do can be recorded, reported. In this kind of world, the Man in the Google Glasses might feel like a king of infinite space. But he"d actually inhabit a comfortable, full-service cage.
A. the American household composition has undergone dramatic changes.
B. the isolation of individuals creates a hotbed for tyranny ideology.
C. internet leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.
D. internet will wipe out the social progress human being have gained in the past centuries.
E. excessive use of internet will lead to individualism.
F. the advance of internet technology will make privacy a nearly impossible thing.
G. the internet provides a platform to deepen and expand communal ties.