How we look matters as much as what we see.

In 2020, I read a book I’d been ignoring for 10 years, Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” It was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and was much loved among people who seemed to hate the internet.

2020年，我读了一本被我忽视了10年的书，尼古拉斯 · 卡尔的《浅薄: 互联网对我们大脑的影响》它入围了2011年的普利策奖决赛，在那些似乎憎恨互联网的人中广受欢迎。

But in 2011, I loved the internet. I am of the generation old enough to remember a time before cyberspace but young enough to have grown up a digital native. And I adored my new land. The endless expanses of information, the people you met as avatars but cared for as humans, the sense that the mind’s reach could be limitless. My life, my career and my identity were digital constructs as much as they were physical ones. I pitied those who came before me, fettered by a physical world I was among the first to escape.

但在2011年，我爱上了互联网。我这一代人的年龄已经足够大，能够记得网络空间出现之前的一段时间，但也足够年轻，能够成长为一名数字时代的本地人。我喜欢我的新大陆。无边无际的信息，你以化身的身份遇到但以人类的身份关心的人，心灵可以无限延伸的感觉。我的生活，我的事业和我的身份都是数字的，就像它们是物理的一样。我同情那些在我之前来到这里的人，他们受到一个物质世界的束缚，而我是第一批逃离这个世界的人之一。

A decade passed, and my certitude faded. Online life got faster, quicker, harsher, louder. “A little bit of everything all of the time,” as the comedian Bo Burnham put it. Smartphones brought the internet everywhere, colonizing moments I never imagined I’d fill. Many times I’ve walked into a public bathroom and everyone is simultaneously using a urinal and staring at a screen.

十年过去了，我的信心消失了。网络生活变得更快，更快，更刺耳，更响亮。正如喜剧演员博•伯纳姆(Bo Burnham)所说: “任何时候任何事情都要做一点。”。智能手机把互联网带得到处都是，殖民时刻我从来没有想过我会填补。很多次我走进一个公共厕所，每个人都同时使用小便池并盯着屏幕。

The collective consequences were worse. The internet had been my escape from the schoolyard, but now it felt as if it had turned the world into a schoolyard. Watching Donald Trump tweet his way to the presidency felt like some sinister apotheosis, as though we’d rubbed the monkey’s paw and gotten our horrible wish. We didn’t want to be bored, and now we never would be.

集体后果更为严重。互联网曾是我逃离校园的出路，但现在感觉它好像把世界变成了一个校园。看着唐纳德 · 特朗普通过推特成为总统，感觉就像是某种邪恶的神化，仿佛我们摩擦了猴子的爪子，得到了我们可怕的愿望。我们不想无聊，现在我们永远不会无聊了。

So when I came across Carr’s book in 2020, I was ready to read it. And what I found in it was a key not just to a theory but also to a whole map of 20th-century media theorists — Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and Neil Postman, to name a few — who saw what was coming and tried to warn us.

所以当我在2020年偶然看到卡尔的书时，我已经准备好要读它了。我在其中发现的不仅是一个理论的关键，也是一张20世纪媒体理论家的地图的关键。这些马素·麦克鲁汉包括沃尔特 · 昂(walterOng)和尼尔 · 波斯特曼(neilpostman) ，他们预见了未来，并试图警告我们。

Carr’s argument began with an observation, one that felt familiar:

卡尔的论点始于一个观察，一个感觉很熟悉的观察:

The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check email, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected.

我大脑工作的方式似乎正在改变。就在那时，我开始担心自己无法把注意力集中在一件事情上超过几分钟。一开始我以为这是中年人思想腐烂的症状。但我意识到，我的大脑不仅仅是在漂移。它饿了。它要求以网络喂养它的方式喂养它，而且喂得越多，它就越饿。甚至当我离开我的电脑，我渴望检查电子邮件，点击链接，做一些谷歌。我希望我们之间有联系。

“Hungry.” That was the word that hooked me. That’s how my brain felt to me, too. Hungry. Needy. Itchy. Once it wanted information. But then it was distraction. And then, with social media, validation. A drumbeat of “You exist. You are seen_.”_

“饿了”这个词吸引了我。我的大脑也是这么想的。饿了。穷困潦倒。痒痒的。它曾经需要信息。然后就是分散注意力。然后，通过社交媒体，验证。“你存在”的鼓点。你被看见了”

Carr’s investigation led him to the work of McLuhan, who lives on in repeat viewings of “Annie Hall” and in his gnomic adage “The medium is the message.” That one’s never done much for me. It’s another McLuhan quote, from early in his 1964 classic, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” that lodged in my mind: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

卡尔的调查使他找到了麦克卢汉的作品，麦克卢汉经常重复观看《安妮 · 霍尔》和他的名言“媒介就是信息”。那个对我没什么用。麦克卢汉在他1964年的经典著作《理解媒体: 人类的延伸》中的另一句名言，印在我的脑海里: “我们对所有媒介的传统反应，即：“媒介如何被使用才是最重要的”这种观点，是技术白痴的麻木立场。因为媒介的‘内容’就像窃贼带着多汁的肉块，用来分散观察者的注意力。”

We’ve been told — and taught — that mediums are neutral and content is king. You can’t say anything about television. The question is whether you’re watching “The Kardashians” or “The Sopranos,” “Sesame Street” or “Paw Patrol.” To say you read books is to say nothing at all: Are you imbibing potboilers or histories of 18th-century Europe? Twitter is just the new town square; if your feed is a hellscape of infighting and outrage, it’s on you to curate your experience more tightly.