本文摘要：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.小说家威尔塞尔夫近日在其为BBC所编写的一篇文章中称之为，年轻人的浪漫情结日益浓烈。
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.小说家威尔塞尔夫近日在其为BBC所编写的一篇文章中称之为，年轻人的浪漫情结日益浓烈。他回应这一现象与互联网有相当大的关系。It is certainly true that the Internet has changed the past and will continue to do so, but are young people really more nostalgic?的确，互联网已转变了过去，今后也仍将如此，但年轻人是不是知道更加浪漫了呢？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.历史是掩身黑暗之中的一系列无形事件的子集。
考古找到与文字曾是我们洞察历史的唯一渠道。印刷术的发明者沦为我们与历史“对话”的一座最重要里程碑。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，互联网或许后来者居上。
一千年以后，我们将仍然为了理解自己身处的世界而不得不说明那些陌生语言——到那时，互联网将获取一个窥知过去的窗口，历史则由微小的数据信息构成。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后，我们周围将尽是预示互联网茁壮一起的第一代人。其中大多数人的生活将不会被几乎记录在互联网上因而以求永久留存。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浏览器的近期广告展出了一个孩子生活中的一系列重大事件，每件事都牵涉到互联网的方方面面——YouTube上，孩子学会走路后迈进第一步的视频；邮件中的电子生日贺卡，Facebook上年轻人聚会的照片。
这一切所表达出有的信息显而易见：生活几乎可以在互联网上全部展现出。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.毫无疑问，这对我们的记忆方式产生了根本性的影响。最重要的事件与经历都能在网上以图文或视频的形式重复看见。
电脑与互联网并非获取给我们新鲜的事物，而是融合了文字、声音、图像等人工记忆的所有技术手段，联合建构出有一种前所未有的，更为反感地唤醒我们记忆的综合体。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.有人指出这一趋势于是以使得年轻人显得愈发浪漫，与自己的过去联系更为密切。通过博客和社交网络，互联网获取了一个年轻人留存自己过去并拜访别人过去的机会。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.可浪漫并不等同于顽固。
事实上，浪漫更好的是对我们自身过去的一种修复。而互联网令人无法感觉到这种浪漫情怀。它替换我们塑造成了我们的过去，这意味著我们的想象力在其中所扮演着的角色没有那么最重要了。
Those dependent on the Internet are not more nostalgic, but less. The Internet has the potential to undo the mysteries of the past.“网络倚赖”并无法加剧这种浪漫情怀，反而不会弱化它。互联网可能会毁坏过去的那份神秘感。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.十九世纪英国诗人约翰济慈在叙述艾萨克牛顿的科学时，为物理学密码了美丽事物的奥秘和“抛弃了彩虹”而痛惜。
（译者录：济慈曾多次责怪：“牛顿把彩虹所有的诗意都毁坏了。彩虹在他眼里只不过是光谱的排序而已。
”“抛弃了彩虹”一句出自于济慈的诗《莱米亚》，诗中对科学展开了责难。）。也许网络将揭露历史中那些最重要的未知领域的谜样面纱。
但这将造成我们对于过去更加缺少想象。Perhaps nostalgia is most fully contained in those elements of the past that are retrospectively unreal, created by our imaginations.或许，浪漫情怀大都蕴藏于我们对历史元素的虚幻追溯到之中，全凭想象大不相同。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?”诗人T.S艾略特曾问道：“遗失在科学知识中的智慧到哪里去了?又要遗失在信息中的科学知识又到哪里去了？”Nostalgia is a kind of ancient, irrational wisdom, and the Internet, with its floods of information, threatens to drown it.浪漫是一种古老而感性的智慧，而它很可能会被网络时代的信息洪流所毁灭。
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