《英语流行话题阅读:语境识词4500》72 E-mail Is Here to Stay

（单词翻译）

　　Unit 72
E-mail Is Here to Stay
Is e-mail a blessing¹ or a curse? Last month, after a week's vacation, I discovered 1,218 unread e-mail messages waiting in my inbox. I pretended to be dismayed, but secretly I was pleased. This is how we measure our wired worth in the late 1990s -- if you aren't overwhelmed by e-mail, you must be doing something wrong. Never mind that after subtracting the stale office chitchat and dumb jokes forwarded by my friends who should know better, there were 7 messages actually worth reading. I was doomed² to spend half my workday just deleting junk.
E-mail. Can't live with it, can't live without it. Artists, advertisers and freedom fighters, lovers and sworn enemies -- they've all turned to e-mail as they would to any new medium of expression. E-mail is convenient, saves time, brings us closer to one another, helps us manage our ever-more-complex lives. Books are written, campaigns conducted, crimes committed -- all via e-mail. But it is also inconvenient³, wastes our time, isolates⁴ us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity⁵ into our lives. To some, e-mail is just the latest chapter in the evolving his story of human communication.
Yet e-mail -- and all online communication -- is something different; it captures the essence of life at the close of the 20th century with an authority that few other products of digital technology can claim. E-mail simultaneously⁶ allows us to cope with that acceleration⁷ and contributes to it. Are our attention spans shortening under attacks of new, improved forms of stimulation⁸? If we accept that the creation of the global-spanning Internet is one of the most important technological⁹ innovations over past 500 years, then we must give e-mail -- the living embodiment of human connection across the Net. The way we interact with people is changing; e-mail is both the catalyst¹⁰ and the instrument of that change.
It may even help us find those whom we want love in the first place. E-mail encourages the shy. It offers a semi-risk environment to start romance. Because it lacks the immediate¹¹ threat of physical rejection¹², people who are shy or had painful romantic failures in the past can use the Net as a way to build a relationship in the early romantic stages. But it's not just about love. E-mail also flattens¹³ hierarchies¹⁴ in the bounds of an office. It's far easier to make a suggestion to your superiors and colleagues via e-mail than it is to do so in a pressure-filled meeting room. Anytime when we have something that is difficult to say, e-mail can make it easier. It serves as a buffer¹⁵ zone.
E-mail, ultimately, is a fragile thing, easy to forge, easy to destroy. A few weeks ago a co-worker of mine accidentally and irretrievably wiped out 1,500 of his own saved messages. For a person who conducts the bulk of his life online, such a digital tragedy is like erasing¹⁶ part of your own memory.
Meanwhile, now that we are all connected across time zones and corporate¹⁷ firewalls, we are beginning to lose sight of the difference between what is work and what is play. Six years after I logged onto CompuServe for the first time, I went to Alice Springs, a frontier town in Australia for a holiday. Instead of wandering through the desert and seeking camels, I found myself checking my mail to see if the Wired Magazine had fresh inquires for me about a story I had submitted. I was on the job -- in large part because I had an e-mail address and had made the Devil's bargain with the wired world. As I listened for the sound of the modem¹⁸ connecting in Alice Springs, I felt I had lost control over some valuable part of my life. Your boss will refrain from calling you at 11:30 pm, but not from sending an enquiring¹⁹, must-be-answered-as-soon-as-you-log-on e-mail. E-mail doesn't just collapse²⁰ distance. It demolishes²¹ all boundaries. And that can be, depending on the moment, either a blessing or a curse.