高考英语《流行话题 语境识词 4500》Unit 72 E-mail Is Here to Stay 素材Unit 72 E-mail Is Here to Stay Is e-mail a blessing 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 doomed 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 inconvenient, wastes our time, isolates us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity 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 simultaneously allows us to cope with that acceleration and contributes to it. Are our attention spans shortening under attacks of new, improved forms of stimulation? If we accept that the creation of the global-spanning Internet is one...
