经济学人下载:互联网是有记忆的,言论不当总要买单(2)

In aiming for these, people often miss the mark, one reason the platform hosts so much recklessness, attention-seeking and off-target humour. Yet though tweets may be appraised like speech, they are punished like writing. Posts may seem to disappear in an endlessly flowing river, but unless they are deleted they live on indefinitely. A public figure’s stupid tweets are more likely than most to be screen-captured by others, so that even deletion won’t help (and may suggest a guilty conscience). In the days after Ms McCammond’s contrite withdrawal, several of her critics at Teen Vogue made their Twitter accounts private. One turned out to have used a racial epithet to jovially address a (white) friend in 2009. 

想要追求这些特质的人们却往往会偏离正轨，这也是推特充斥着草率、博关注且不着调的幽默段子的原因之一。然而，尽管推文可能被评价为与口语对话类似，但它们却要像书面语一样受到谴责。推文看似会淹没于层出不穷的新推文河流中，但除非被删除，否则它们将无限期地存在。相较于大多数人，公众人物欠妥的推文要更容易被其他人截屏，所以即使删除也无济于事（还可能昭示博主心里有鬼）。在麦卡蒙德悔恨地删除推文后的几天里，她在《美国青少年时尚》工作的几位批评者将自己的推特账户设为私密。其中一人在2009年曾用种族侮辱性称号打趣一位（白人）朋友。

How will society adjust to this new speech-text hybrid? One theory is that only the most conformist or risk-averse will succeed in a sort of woke dystopia; the rest will be vulnerable to the discovery of an embarrassing tweet in an ever-growing back catalogue. A second possible outcome is safety in numbers. So many people (including path-breaking members of minority groups) will be deemed to have transgressed that skeletons in closets come to be regarded as inevitable. In this scenario, society accepts that more or less everyone has said regrettable things, and that, at least in some cases, tweeting them was merely a dangerous category mistake. 

社会将如何适应这种新的口语和书面语的混合形式？一种理论认为，只有最墨守成规或规避风险的人才会在充斥网暴的社交媒体中游刃有余；其他人则会在被翻阅日积月累的过往推文时，被尴尬的推文轻易击垮。第二个可能的结果是人多保险。如果有太多人的行为被视为越轨（包括少数群体的领先成员），那么人们也会觉得这样的隐情丑事是不可避免的。在这种情况下，社会可以接受，每个人或多或少都曾说过令人遗憾的话，至少在某些情况下，发推文只是一种危险的范畴错误。

Alas, that consensus seems a long way off. Hence the third possibility: that people will learn to keep their risky jokes offline, understanding that even if they feel like colloquial remarks, offensive comments written in black and white can be recalled and judged that way. This would make Twitter a lot duller. Spontaneity is its appeal. But the more careers that are derailed, the more parents will urge children to mind their language online, just as they have long warned them to be careful with strangers. 

唉，达成共识似乎还有很长的路要走。因此，第三种可能性是：人们将学会不在网上发表有危险的笑话。他们须得理解即使自己只发了类似口语的文字，但这样白纸黑字的冒犯性书面语还是会被人想起、遭到评判。这会让推特变得更沉闷无聊。率性是它的感染力。但越多的职业生涯因推文而断送，父母就越会敦促孩子注意网络用语，就像他们长期以来一直提醒孩子要小心陌生人一样。

Human speech has been around for at least tens of thousands of years, writing for about five millennia. Twitter had its 15th birthday on March 21st. It may be wisest to err on the side of boring until norms settle down. 

人类的口头语至少已经存在了几万年，书面语也已经有五千年了。推特在3月21日迎来了它的15岁生日。在规范稳定下来之前，最明智的做法是宁可无聊，也别冒险。