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or even online pornography; e-mail is the Internet’s true killer app the software application that we simply must have, even if it means buying a $ 2,000 computer and plunking down $ 20 a month to America Online. According to Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University, one survey after another finds that when online users are asked what they do on the Net, “e-mail is always No. 1.”

这种现象的范围是令人难以想象的。全球有2亿2千5百万人可以收发电子邮件。忘记网络，或是电子商务，或是在线色情网站吧，电子邮件才是因特网真正的最佳应用程序——我们必须拥有的程序，即使这意味着要买2000美元一台的电脑，每月要付给美国在线20美元。根据多纳·霍夫曼，一位在范德比特大学的市场营销教授在一次又一次的调查之后发现，当受访者被问到他们上网是在做什么时，他们总是回答：“电子邮件总是排在第一。”

Oddly enough, no one planned it, and no one predicted it. When research scientists first began cooking up the Internet’s predecessor, the Arpanet, in 1968, their primary goal was to enable disparate computing centers to share resources. “But it didn’t take very long before they discovered that the most important thing was the ability to send mail around, which they had not anticipated at all,” says Eric Allman, chief technical officer of Sendmail, Inc., and the primary author of a

20-year-old program — Sendmail that still transports the vast majority of the world’s e-mail across the Internet. It seems that what all those top computer scientists really wanted to use the Internet for was as a place to debate, via e-mail, such crucially important topics as the best science-fiction novel of all time. Even though Allman is now quite proud that his software helps hundreds of millions of people communicate, he says he didn’t set out originally to change the world. As a systems administrator at DC Berkeley in the late ’70s, he was constantly hassled by computer science researchers in one building who wanted to get their email from machines in another location. “I just wanted to make my life easier,” says Allman.

令人费解的是，没有人计划过，也没有人预测过。当作研究的科学家在1968年一开始设计因特网的雏形ARPA 计算机网的时候，他们的主要目的是让互不联系的运算中心能够共享资源。“但是不久以后他们发现最重要的其实是能够到处发信的能力，他们其实事先根本没有预见到”，Sendmail公司的首席技术官恩里克·奥曼说道，他本人也有20年是Sendmail这个程序的主要编写人员，这个软件今天仍然在因特网上传输大量的邮件。似乎那些顶尖的计算机科学家真正希望使因特网成为一个通过电子邮件，供大家争论一些重要话题的地方，如同一直以来的一个科幻小说温床一样。虽然奥曼现在很自豪，他的软件帮助数亿人沟通，他说他一开始并没有打算改变世界。在70年代他是加州大学伯克利分校的系统管理员，那里的计算机科学研究员时常要麻烦他，要让他帮忙从另一个地点的机器里收取他们的电子邮件。“我只是想让我的生活轻松点。”奥曼说道。

Don’t we all? When my first child was born in 1994, email seemed to me some kind of Promethean gift perfectly designed

to help me cope with the irreconcilable pressures of new fatherhood and full-time freelance writing. It saved me time and money without ever requiring me to leave the house; it salvaged my social life, allowed me to conduct interviews as a reporter and kept a lifeline open to my far-flung extended family. Indeed, I finally knew for sure that the digital world was viscerally potent when I found myself in the middle of a bitter fight with my mother — on e-mail. Again, new medium, old story. 我们又何尝不想呢？当我的第一个孩子在1994年出生的时候，电子邮件对我来说似乎就像普罗米修斯的礼物，刚好帮我应对了初为人父和全职自由撰稿人之间不可调和的压力。它帮我省下了时间和金钱，我都不用走出家门；它拯救了我的社交生活，允许我作为一名记者进行采访，又能够让我同远隔千山万水的大家庭联系。的确，我终于确信当我在同我母亲进行一场电子邮件苦战的时候，数字世界是强有力的。同样，新的媒体，老的故事。

My mother had given me an e-mail head start. In 1988, she bought me a modem so I could create a CompuServe account. The reason? Her younger brother had contracted a

rapidly worsening case of Parkinson’s disease. He wasn’t able to talk clearly, and could hardly scrawl his name with a pen or pencil. But he had a computer, and could peck out words on a keyboard. My mom figured that if the family all had CompuServe accounts, we could send him e-mail. She grasped, long before the Internet became a household word, how online communication offered new possibilities for transcending physical

limitations, how as simple a thing as email could bring us closer to those whom we love.

我的母亲是我使用电子邮件的启蒙者。1988年，她给我买了一个调制解调器，我创建了Compuserve 账户，为什么呢？她的弟弟帕金森症恶化了。他不能清楚地说话，几乎连名字都不能写了。但是他有一台电脑，能够在键盘上打字。我母亲认为，如果所有的家庭成员都有Compuserve 的账户，我们就可以给他写电子邮件。她可谓是很久之前就了解因特网会成为家庭常用词，了解在线联络可以如何穿越生理限制，简单的电子邮件可以如何拉近我们与我们所爱的人之间的距离。

It may even help us find those whom we want to love in the first place. Jenn Shreve is a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area who keeps a close eye on the emerging culture of the new online generation. For the last couple of years, she’s seen what she considers to be a

positive change in online dating habits. E-mail, she argues, encourages the shy. “It offers a semi-risk-free environment to initiate romance,” says Shreve. “Because it lacks the immediate threat of physical rejection, people who are perhaps shy or had painful romantic failures in the past can use the Internet as a way to build a relationship in the early romantic stages.”

它甚至可以一下子帮我们找到我们想爱的人。简恩·希瑞夫是旧金山海湾地区的自由作家，她一直关注新的网络一代的新兴文化。最近几年，她看到了网络约会习惯发生了积极的变化。她认为，电子邮件鼓励那些害羞的人。“它创造了一种半无风险的环境，方便制造浪漫，”希瑞夫说道，“因为它没有直接的生理拒绝的威胁，害羞的人们或者过去曾有过惨痛经历的人可以使用因特网建立早期的浪漫关系。”

But it’s not just about lust. E-mail also flattens hierarchies within the bounds of an office. It is far easier, Shreve notes, to make a suggestion to your superiors and colleagues via e-mail than it is to do so in a pressure-filled meeting room. “Any time when you have something that is difficult to say, e-mail can make it easier,” she says. “It serves as a buffer zone. ”

但这并不只是欲望而已。电子邮件也使得办公室里的等级观念变淡。希瑞夫注意到，通过电子邮件向你的上级和同事提意见要比在压力重重的会议室里简单得多。“任何时候，当你觉得有什么事情难以开口，电子邮件总能化繁为简。”她说，“它就像一个缓冲带。”

Of course, e-mail’s uses as a social lubricant can be taken to extremes. There is little point in denying the obvious dark side to the lack of self-constraint encouraged by e-mail. Purveyors of

pornography rarely call us on the phone and suggest out loud that we check out some “hot teen action.” But they don’t think twice about jamming our e-mail boxes full of outrageously prurient advertisements. People who would never insult us face to face will spew the vilest, most objectionable, most appalling rhetoric imaginable via e-mail or an instant message, or in the no-holds-barred confines of a chat room.

当然，把电子邮件作为一种社会润滑剂也有极端的一面。不容否认电邮由于缺乏自我控制而带来明显的负面影响。色情传播者几乎从来不打电话大声宣传说我们去访问一些“少年色情行为”。但是他们会不假思索地用大量赤裸裸的淫秽广告塞满我们的电子邮箱。从来不当面攻击我们的人会通过电子邮件或是即时消息，或是在毫无限制的聊天室内宣泄最卑鄙，最令人反感，最令人惊骇的言辞。

Cyberspace’s lapses in gentility underscores a central

contradiction inherent in online communication. If it is true that hours spent on the Net are often hours subtracted from watching television, one could argue that the digital era has raised the curtains on a new age of literacy — more people are writing more words than ever before! But what kind of words are we writing? Are we really more literate, or are we sliding ever faster into a quicksand of meaningless irrelevance, of pop-cultural triviality — expressed, usually, in lowercase letters — run amok? E-mail is actually too easy, too casual. Gone are the days when one would worry over a letter to a lover or a relative or a colleague. Now there’s just time for that quick e-mail, a few hastily cobbled together thoughts written in a colloquial style that usually borders on unedited stream of consciousness. The danger is obvious, snippy comments to a friend, overly sharp retorts to One’s boss, insults mistakenly sent to the target, not the intended audience. E-mail allows us to act before we can think — the perfect tool for a culture of hyperstimulation.

电脑空间的文明丧失折射出网络通讯的内在矛盾。如果说花在网络上的时间是从看电视这里分出来的，那么可以认为数字时代揭开了文化教育的新时代——更多的人要比以往写更多的字！但是我们在写怎样的文字啊？我们是不是变得更加有文化，还是我们只是更快地陷入了毫无意义的文字，以及流行文化的琐碎的陷阱——往往是用小写字母书写，四处横行的电子邮件往往太过于简单、随意。人们会担心情书、家书，或者给同事的书信中的一个字母的时代已经一去不复返。现在的时代，电子邮件往往是草草书写，用口语的方式表达思想，可以说简直就是未加编辑的意识流文字。危险是显而易见的：对朋友无礼的评论，对老板过于尖锐的反驳，对错误的目标发起攻击。电子邮件使得我们会不假思索采取行动——正是超级刺激时代的完美工具。

So instead of creating something new, we forward something old. Instead of crafting the perfect phrase, we use a brain-dead abbreviation, IMHO for In My Humble Opinion, or ROTFLMAO, for Rolling On The Floor Laughing My A-Off. Got a rumor? E-mail it to 50 people! Instant messaging and chat rooms just accentuate the casual negative. If e-mail requires little thought, then instant messaging — flashing a message directly onto a recipient’s computer monitor — is so insubstantial as to be practically nonexistent.

因此，我们其实抄送了一些陈旧的事物而不是创造了新兴的事物。我们没有创造出完美的词藻，相反，我们使用不经过大脑思考的缩写：用IMHO 指代 In my humble opinion （依我拙见），或者 ROTFLMAO 代表rolling on the floor laughing my A-off （在地上笑得打滚）。听到什么谣言？发给50个人！即时信息和聊天室只是加重了这种负面影响。如果电子邮件让人们不假思索，那么即

时信息——直接出现在接收者电脑屏幕上的信息——是如此的无实质性，简直可以被视作不存在。

E-mail, ultimately, is a fragile thing, easy to forge, easy to corrupt, easy to destroy. A few weeks ago a coworker 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 akin to erasing part of your own memory. Suddenly, nothing’s left. It is comforting to think that, if preserved in a retrievable way, all the notes the world is passing back and forth today constitute a vast historical archive, but the opposite may also be true. Earlier this summer, I visited some curators at the Stanford University Library who are hard at work compiling a digital archive of Silicon Valley history. They bemoaned a new, fast-spreading corporate policy that requires the deletion of all corporate e-mails after every 60 or 90 days. As Microsoft and Netscape have learned to their dismay, old e-mails,however trivial they seem when they are written, can and will come back to haunt you. It is best, say the lawyers, to just wipe them all out.

电子邮件归根结底是脆弱的，很容易作假，容易篡改，容易破坏。几周之前我的同事不小心也不可逆转地删除了他保存的1500条信息。对于一个将大部分时间用作上网的人来说，这不啻于抹去了你部分的记忆。突然之间，一无所有。这样想可能会有所安慰，如果都用可以逆转的方式保存，那么所有的今天在世上传递的信息构成了巨大的历史档案，但是反过来可能也是正确的。近年夏天早些时候，我拜访了斯坦福大学图书馆的一些馆长，他们正努力编撰一部硅谷历史的电子档案。他们哀叹一条新的迅速推广的公司政策，即要求每过60天或90天必须删除所有的公司电子邮件。微软和网景之后沮丧地发现，旧的电子邮件无论当时多么不起眼，都能够也将会来骚扰你。律师说，最好还是把它们都删掉。

Still, e-mail is enabling radically new forms of worldwide human collaboration. Those 225 million people who can send and receive it represent a network of potentially cooperating individuals dwarfing anything that even the mightiest corporation or government can muster. Mailing-list discussion groups and online conferencing allow us to gather together to work on a multitude of projects that are interesting or helpful to us — to pool our collective efforts in a fashion never before possible. The most obvious place to see this collaboration right now is in the world of software. For decades, programmers have used e-mail to collaborate on projects. With increasing frequency, this collaboration is occurring across company lines, and often without even the spur of commercial incentives. It’s happening largely because it can — it’s relatively easy for a thousand programmers to collectively contribute to a project using e-mail and the Internet. Perhaps each individual contribution is small, but the scale of the Internet multiplies all efforts dramatically.

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