网络让我们更怀旧?

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所撰写的一篇文章中称，年轻人的怀旧情结日益浓厚。他表示这一现象与互联网有很大的关系。

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，互联网已改变了过去，今后也仍将如此，但年轻人是不是真的越来越怀旧了呢？

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集合。考古发现与文字曾是我们洞察历史的唯一渠道。印刷术的发明成为我们与历史“对话”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，互联网似乎后来者居上。一千年以后，我们将不再为了了解自己身处的世界而被迫解释那些陌生语言——到那时，互联网将提供一个窥知过去的窗口，历史则由微小的数据信息组成。

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，我们周围将尽是伴随互联网成长起来的第一代人。其中大多数人的生活将会被完全记录在互联网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浏览器的最新广告展示了一个孩子生活中的一系列重大事件，每件事都关乎互联网的方方面面——YouTube上，孩子学会走路后迈出第一步的视频；邮件中的电子生日贺卡，Facebook上年轻人聚会的照片。这一切所传达出的信息显而易见：生活完全可以在互联网上全部展现。

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重大的影响。重要的事件与经历都能在网上以图文或视频的形式反复看到。电脑与互联网并非提供给我们新鲜的事物，而是融合了文字、声音、图像等人工记忆的所有技术手段，共同创造出一种前所未有的，更加强烈地唤起我们记忆的综合体。

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.

有人认为这一趋势正使得年轻人变得愈加怀旧，与自己的过去联系更加紧密。通过博客和社交网络，互联网提供了一个年轻人保存自己过去并造访别人过去的机会。

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.

可怀旧并不等同于守旧。事实上，怀旧更多的是对我们自身过去的一种重建。而互联网令人难以感觉到这种怀旧情怀。它代替我们塑造了我们的过去，这意味着我们的想象力在其中所扮演的角色没那么重要了。

Those dependent on the Internet are not more nostalgic, but less. The Internet has the potential to undo the mysteries of the past.

“网络依赖”并不能加深这种怀旧情怀，反而会弱化它。互联网可能会破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•济慈在描述艾萨克•牛顿的科学时，为物理学破解了美丽事物的奥秘和“拆散了彩虹”而惋惜。（译者注：济慈曾经抱怨：“牛顿把彩虹所有的诗意都破坏了。彩虹在他眼里只不过是光谱的排列而已。”“拆散了彩虹”一句出自济慈的诗《莱米亚》，诗中对科学进行了非难。）。或许网络将揭开历史中那些重要的未知领域的神秘面纱。但这将导致我们对于过去越来越缺乏想象。

Perhaps nostalgia is most fully contained in those elements of the past that are retrospectively unreal, created by our imaginations.

也许，怀旧情怀大都蕴含于我们对历史元素的虚幻追溯之中，全凭想象使然。

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?”

诗人T.S•艾略特曾问道：“遗失在知识中的智慧到哪里去了?又要遗失在信息中的知识又到哪里去了？”

Nostalgia is a kind of ancient, irrational wisdom, and the Internet, with its floods of information, threatens to drown it.

怀旧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吞噬。