英語范文背誦精華 29.3 The Effects the Internet Age Has on Our Work-and-Rest T
A long, long time ago, people rose with the sun, and set with it. Nobody care if it was sunny somewhere else. Voices didn’t carry across the planet. Time was local concept: time to milk the cows, time to get in the wheat and rice, time to sit and rest.
Who knows when the changes began: all these have changed. Today, commerce and communication never cease but go around the clock. On cable-TV news and events did not happen at which hour, but an hour or 30 minutes ago. Local time is no longer the meaning marker of events.
In this information age, the internet never breaks for a rest, nor for sleep. But humans will sleep and must sleep, because if people want to stay alive, they must live by their own nature’s clock.However, this information age has seen the death of shared routines and will shake people and society to their core. For example, our companions perhaps are no longer our community neighbors, but the people on our e-mail list, or simply no one.
The round-the-clock timetable is changing our way of life. The 21st century office never leaves us. We bring our wireless cell phones and notebook computer when vacationing. There are people who bring their cell phones into concert halls and auditoriums. For them, you missing an important message is not a miss that is remediable.
The round-the-clock hyperspeed “Internet time”won’t give us quite time for resting and thinking. An increasing number of business executives have taken to bragging about how much sleep they get. For them, the ultimate status symbol is the power to live by nature’s clock rather than the Net’s clock.
Of course, there is no going back to the agrarian past. I think the right attitude is to go with the tide of time and live as a master of our time without submitting to a kind of 21st century enslavement. We will have learned to arrange our lives according to our nature’s clock within the framework of the 24-hour timetable of the Net, rather than chasing after the Net’s sun that never sets, for such an act is , undoubtedly, not only a sign of incompetence but also an act of burning the candle at both ends.
As far as I’m concerned, we need ever shinning Net’s light without sacrificing the nature’s candle that has a life.
