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The Deep Space of
Digital Reading
By Paul La Farge ∷杨雪 译注
技术的更新总是让一部分人恐慌，仿佛随之淘汰的不仅仅是落后的技术，还有人类视为珍宝的文化遗产。从朗读，到默读，再到电子阅读，阅读经历了一次又一次革命。这样的革命究竟是好是坏？且听作者细细道来。
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In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity1, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D.,2he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes, ... the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.3
在《阅读的历史》中，加拿大小说家阿尔维托·曼古埃尔指出了大约公元10世纪时人类意识的伟大转型：默读时代的到来。人类读书的历史已有上千年，但此前都是朗读。公元384年，奥古斯丁（即后来的圣奥古斯丁）到米兰去见他的老师圣安波罗修，当他看到老师默默地看着一本书时吓了一跳。曼古埃尔写道，默读的到来，使读者终于能够与书本和文字建立起不受限制的联系。文字不再念出声省出了原本所需的时间。它们在自己的空间中既可以一气呵成，也可以徐徐道来，可以详尽阐述，也可以留人遐思。而读者则有充分的时间在阅读时去审视文字，阐发新的奥义，将其与记忆和手边同时在研读的其他书籍做一番参照比较。
To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom "the secret gift of time to think": When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.
默读解放了你的大脑，使其可以反思，可以记忆，可以提问，可以比较。认知科学家玛莉安·沃尔夫把这种自由称作“思考时间的神秘馈赠”：大脑负责阅读的区域学会自动处理书写符号之后，负责思考的区域就有时间跳出字面来发展思维和其扎根的文化。
1. antiquity:（尤指公元476年罗马帝国灭亡前的）古代。
2. Augustine: 奥古斯丁（公元354—430），早期西方基督教的神学家、哲学家，著有《忏悔录》、《论三位一体》等，其一生深受圣安波罗修的影响；Ambrose: 圣安波罗修（约公元340—397），米兰主教，4世纪基督教著名的拉丁教父，也是罗马公教公认的四大教会圣师之一。
3.decipher: 译释（难解的古代文字，或难理解的事物）；inspect: 检查，审视；perusal: 精读，细读。
A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril4. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called “the shallows,” a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next.5In Carr’s view, the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet imperils our very being: “One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is ... a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.”6
一千年后，评论家们开始担心数字技术会使这一馈赠面临风险。互联网上大量涌现的信息，社交媒体带来的注意力分散，逐渐侵蚀着阅读的内在空间，将我们置于记者尼古拉斯·卡尔所说的“浅薄”之中，在一个又一个的事实中狂躁地闪过。在卡尔看来，互联网“无尽而诱人的嗡鸣”正危及着我们的存在。他写道：“当我们使大脑自动运转，并将思想和记忆的掌控权让渡给强大的电子系统时，我们面临的巨大的威胁之一就是，作为人的资格和人性的逐渐消蚀。
There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways7. Done badly, the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment8the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.
无疑，数字技术对阅读中的大脑来说是一个挑战，但是从历史的角度来看，两者只是程度不同，而非性质有别。数字阅读带来了一些新的东西，其结果有利有弊。运用不当的话，互联网会把我们都变成毫无大脑、只会按键的机器，麻木地往下翻着永远翻不完的页面；但如果运用得当，互联网则有可能大大扩展我们自学会默读以来引以为豪的思维空间。
4. peril: 巨大的危险。
5. strand: 使搁浅，使处于困境；frenzied: 狂热的，狂乱的；flitting: 掠过，闪过。
6. mesmerizing: 迷人的；imperil: 危及，使陷入危险；cede: 割让，放弃；erosion: 侵蚀，逐步毁坏。
7. cut both ways: 各有利弊。
8. augment: 提高，增大。圣安波罗修的影响；Ambrose: 圣安波罗修（约公元340—397），米兰主教，4世纪基督教著名的拉丁教父，也是罗马公教公认的四大教会圣师之一。
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The German historian Rolf Engelsing argues that a “reading revolution” took place at the end of the 18th century: Before that point, the typical European reader had only a few books—the
Bible, an almanac, maybe a work of devotional literature—and he read them over and over, so that they were deeply impressed on his consciousness.9Afterward, Europeans read all kinds of material—novels, periodicals, newspapers—and they read each item only once before racing on to the next. Contemporary critics were doubtless appalled, but on the other hand, from that flood of printed matter, we got the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the American and French revolutions.
德国历史学家罗尔夫·恩格辛指出，18世纪末发生了一场“阅读革命”：在此之前，一个典型的欧洲读者拥有的书很少——一部《圣经》，一本年历，或许再加上一本宗教文学——他来来回回地阅读，把内容深深印在脑海里。后来，欧洲人的阅读范围扩大了——小说、杂志、报纸——都只读一遍就忙不迭地打开另一个。当代评论家对此感到恐慌，但是另一方面，正是这些洪水般的印刷文字，催生了启蒙运动、浪漫主义、美国独立战争和法国大革命。
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2015 study by the German educator Johannes Naumann suggests the opposite. He gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield10 up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.
确实，研究发现，屏幕阅读的读者在进行记忆和理解测试时，表现不如纸上阅读者。但德国教育学家约翰内斯·诺曼2015年的研究却得出相反的结论。他让一组高中生去搜集网页上的某些特定信息，然后发现经常在网上查找资料的学生——换句话说，那些相信网页可以产出有用信息的学生——这一任务（包括过滤无用的信息）完成得更好；而只是利用网络发邮件、聊天、写博客的学生则差些。
A new generation of digital writers is building on video games, incorporating their interactive features—and cognitive sparks—into novelistic narratives that embrace the capabilities of our screens and tablets.
新一代的数字作家正在从电子游戏中寻找灵感，把交互性和认知力融入到通过屏幕阅读的小说创作中去。
9. almanac: 年历，历书；devotional: 宗教礼拜的，祈祷的。
10. yield: 产生，出产。
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从线性阅读的莎草纸时代，
到未来集文本、图片、视频、音频于一身的电子书。
听作者畅聊一百个世纪的而阅读变迁
尽在2017《英语学习》8月新刊
主编： 侯毅凌
《英语学习》杂志创刊于1958年，由北京外国语大学主办，是一本集知识、学习和趣味于一体的英语文化综合性刊物，被评为“全国优秀外语教辅期刊”，一贯以“学习英语的终身益友，了解世界的精彩橱窗”为宗旨，在突出人文旨趣、深入介绍西方社会文化、增进阅读者的英语修养的理念指导下，坚持严谨而不失活泼、品位与趣味并重的办刊风格，凸显杂志的高等教育气质。
2017上半年合订本38元包邮倒计时，
-拼着买更划算-
2人即可成团