網絡讓我們更懷舊?
Writing for the BBC, the novelist Will Self recently claimed that young people are becoming more and more nostalgic. The Internet has a lot to do with this, he suggested.
小說家威爾•塞爾夫近日在其爲BBC所撰寫的一篇文章中稱，年輕人的懷舊情結日益濃厚。他表示這一現象與互聯網有很大的關係。
It is certainly true that the Internet has changed the past and will continue to do so, but are young people really more nostalgic?
的確，互聯網已改變了過去，今後也仍將如此，但年輕人是不是真的越來越懷舊了呢？
History is an array of invisible events, hidden in darkness. Archaeological evidence and the written language were previously our only insights into what once happened. The invention of the printing press was a major milestone in our ability to engage with history.
歷史是掩身黑暗之中的一系列無形事件的集合。考古發現與文字曾是我們洞察歷史的唯一渠道。印刷術的發明成爲我們與歷史“對話”的一座重要里程碑。
The Internet, though, appears to be set to surpass even that. A millennium from now, we will no longer be forced to interpret strange languages in order to comprehend our world–the Internet will provide a window into the past, consisting of tiny units of digital data.
然而，互聯網似乎後來者居上。一千年以後，我們將不再爲了瞭解自己身處的世界而被迫解釋那些陌生語言——到那時，互聯網將提供一個窺知過去的窗口，歷史則由微小的數據信息組成。
Even just a few years from now we will be surrounded by the first generation of adults who grew up with the Internet. The majority of these individual lives will be eternalized online.
甚至只需短短几年之後，我們周圍將盡是伴隨互聯網成長起來的第一代人。其中大多數人的生活將會被完全記錄在互聯網上因而得以永久保存。
A recent advertisement for Google Chrome showed a series of important events in a child’s life, each one belonging to a different part of the Internet – the first steps on YouTube; birthday e-mails; Facebook photos of teenage parties. The message was clear: a life can now be fully expressed through the Internet.
谷歌Chrome瀏覽器的最新廣告展示了一個孩子生活中的一系列重大事件，每件事都關乎互聯網的方方面面——YouTube上，孩子學會走路後邁出第一步的視頻；郵件中的電子生日賀卡，Facebook上年輕人聚會的照片。這一切所傳達出的信息顯而易見：生活完全可以在互聯網上全部展現。
This, of course, has a significant effect on how we remember things. Online, major events and experiences can be read about–and with video, watched–again and again. Computers and the Internet, rather than offering something new, combine all our technological means of artificial memory–text, sound and image–to create a synthesis that can recall memories more intensely than anything before.
毫無疑問，這對我們的記憶方式產生了重大的影響。重要的事件與經歷都能在網上以圖文或視頻的形式反覆看到。電腦與互聯網並非提供給我們新鮮的事物，而是融合了文字、聲音、圖像等人工記憶的所有技術手段，共同創造出一種前所未有的，更加強烈地喚起我們記憶的綜合體。
Some have suggested that this trend is making young people more nostalgic and more continually engaged in their own past. Through blogging and social networking, the Internet allows young people to retain their own past and also visit others’ pasts.
有人認爲這一趨勢正使得年輕人變得愈加懷舊，與自己的過去聯繫更加緊密。通過博客和社交網絡，互聯網提供了一個年輕人保存自己過去並造訪別人過去的機會。
Nostalgia, though, is not quite the same thing as caring about the past. In fact, nostalgia is more about our own reconstruction of the past than anything else. Yet the Internet makes nostalgia more difficult to feel. It does the work of constructing the past for us, meaning that our imaginations play a considerably smaller role.
可懷舊並不等同於守舊。事實上，懷舊更多的是對我們自身過去的一種重建。而互聯網令人難以感覺到這種懷舊情懷。它代替我們塑造了我們的過去，這意味着我們的想象力在其中所扮演的角色沒那麼重要了。
Those dependent on the Internet are not more nostalgic, but less. The Internet has the potential to undo the mysteries of the past.
“網絡依賴”並不能加深這種懷舊情懷，反而會弱化它。互聯網可能會破壞過去的那份神祕感。
When John Keats, a 19th century English poet, described Isaac Newton’s science, he bemoaned the ability of physics to demystify beauty and “unweave the rainbow”. The Internet, perhaps, will be the unweaver of the great, unexplored landscape of the past. As a result, we will imagine less of the past.
十九世紀英國詩人約翰•濟慈在描述艾薩克•牛頓的科學時，爲物理學破解了美麗事物的奧祕和“拆散了彩虹”而惋惜。（譯者注：濟慈曾經抱怨：“牛頓把彩虹所有的詩意都破壞了。彩虹在他眼裏只不過是光譜的排列而已。”“拆散了彩虹”一句出自濟慈的詩《萊米亞》，詩中對科學進行了非難。）。或許網絡將揭開歷史中那些重要的未知領域的神祕面紗。但這將導致我們對於過去越來越缺乏想象。
Perhaps nostalgia is most fully contained in those elements of the past that are retrospectively unreal, created by our imaginations.
也許，懷舊情懷大都蘊含於我們對歷史元素的虛幻追溯之中，全憑想象使然。
The poet T.S. Eliot once asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
詩人T.S•艾略特曾問道：“遺失在知識中的智慧到哪裏去了?又要遺失在信息中的知識又到哪裏去了？”
Nostalgia is a kind of ancient, irrational wisdom, and the Internet, with its floods of information, threatens to drown it.
懷舊是一種古老而感性的智慧，而它很可能會被網絡時代的信息洪流所吞噬。
