【Unit 6课文】Old Father Time Becomes a Terror
2012-06-02 10:43阅读：
Old Father Time Becomes a
Terror
Richard Tomkins
1 Once upon a time,
technology, we thought, would
make our lives easier. Machines
were expected to do our
work for us, leaving us
with ever-increasing quantities of
time to waste away on
idleness and pleasure.
2 But instead of liberating
us, technology has enslaved us.
Innovations are occurring at a
bewildering rate: as many now
arrive in a year as once
arrived in a millennium. And
as each invention arrives, it
eats further into our
time.
3 The motorcar, for example,
promised unimaginable levels of
personal mobility. But now,
traffic in cities moves more
slowly than it did in the
days of the horse-drawn
carriage, and we waste our
lives stuck in traffic
jams.
4 The aircraft promised new
horizons, too. The trouble is,
it delivered them. Its very
existence created a demand for
time-consuming journeys that we
would never previously have
dreamed of undertaking -- the
transatlantic shopping expedition, for
example, or the trip to a
convention on the other side
of the world.
5 In most cases, technology
has not saved time, but
enabled us to do more
things. In the home, washing
machines promised to free women
from having to toil over
the laundry. In reality, they
encouraged us to change our
clothes daily instead of weekly,
creating seven times as much
washing and ironing. Similarly,
the weekly bath has been
replaced by the daily shower,
multiplying the hours spent on
personal grooming.
6 Meanwhile, technology has not
only allowed work to spread
into our leisure time --
the laptop on-the-beach syndrome
-- but added the new
burden of dealing with faxes,
e-mails and voicemails. It has
also provided us with the
opportunity to spend hours
fixing software glitches on our
personal computers or filling
our heads with useless
information from the
Internet.
7 Technology apart, the Internet
points the way to a
second reason why we feel
so time-pressed: the information
explosion.
8 A couple of centuries
ago, nearly all the world's
accumulated learning could be
contained in the heads of
a few philosophers. Today, those
heads could not hope to
accommodate more than a tiny
fraction of the information
generated in a single
day.
9 News, facts and opinions
pour in from every corner
of the world. The television
set offers 150 channels. There
are millions of Internet sites.
Magazines, books and CD-ROMs
proliferate.
10 'In the whole world of
scholarship, there were only a
handful of scientific journals
in the 18th century, and
the publication of a book
was an event,' says Edward
Wilson, honorary curator in
entomology at Harvard University's
museum of comparative zoology.
'Now, I find myself subscribing
to 60 or 70 journals or
magazines just to keep me
up with what amounts to a
minute proportion of the
expanding frontiers of
scholarship.'
11 There is another reason
for our increased time stress
levels, too: rising prosperity.
As ever-larger quantities of
goods and services are produced,
they have to be consumed.
Driven on by advertising, we
do our best to oblige: we
buy more, travel more and
play more, but we struggle
to keep up. So we suffer
from what Wilson calls
discontent with super abundance
-- the confusion of endless
choice.
12 Of course, not everyone
is overstressed. 'It's a
convenient shorthand to say
we're all time-starved, but we
have to remember that it
only applies to, say, half
the population,' says Michael
Willmott, director of the Future
Foundation, a London research
company.
13 'You've got people retiring
early, you've got the
unemployed, you've got other
people maybe only peripherally
involved in the economy who
don't have this situation at
all. If you're unemployed, your
problem is that you've got
too much time, not too
little.'
14 Paul Edwards, chairman of
the London-based Henley Centre
forecasting group, points out
that the feeling of pressures
can also be exaggerated, or
self-imposed. 'Everyone talks about
it so much that about 50
percent of unemployed or retired
people will tell you they
never have enough time to
get things done,' he says.
'It's almost got to the
point where there's stress envy.
If you're not stressed, you're
not succeeding. Everyone wants
to have a little bit of
this stress to show they're
an important person.'
15 There is another aspect
to all of this too.
Hour-by-hour logs kept by
thousands of volunteers over the
decades have shown that, in
the U.K. , working hours
have risen only slightly in
the last 10 years, and in
the U.S., they have actually
fallen -- even for those
in professional and executive
jobs, where the perceptions of
stress are highest.
16 In the U.S., John
Robinson, professor of sociology
at the University of Maryland,
and Geoffrey Godbey, professor
of leisure studies at Penn
State University found that,
since the mid-1960s, the average
American had gained five hours
a week in free time --
that is, time left after
working, sleeping, commuting, caring
for children and doing the
chores.
17 The gains, however, were
unevenly distributed. The people
who benefited the most were
singles and empty-nesters. Those
who gained the least --
less than an hour -- were
working couples with pre-school
children, perhaps reflecting the
trend for parents to spend
more time nurturing their
offspring.
18 There is, of course, a
gender issue here, too. Advances
in household appliances may have
encouraged women to take paying
jobs: but as we have
already noted, technology did
not end household chores. As
a result, we see appalling
inequalities in the distribution
of free time between the
sexes. According to the Henley
Centre, working fathers in the
U. K. average 48 hours of
free time a week. Working
mothers get 14.
19 Inequalities apart, the
perception of the time famine
is widespread, and has provoked
a variety of reactions. One
is an attempt to gain the
largest possible amount of
satisfaction from the smallest
possible investment of time.
People today want fast food,
sound bytes and instant
gratification. And they become
upset when time is
wasted.
20 'People talk about quality
time. They want perfect
moments,' says the Henley
Centre's Edwards. 'If you take
your kids to a movie and
McDonald's and it's not perfect,
you've wasted an afternoon, and
it's a sense that you've
lost something precious. If you
lose some money you can
earn some more, but if
you waste time you can
never get it back.'
21 People are also trying
to buy time. Anything that
helps streamline our lives is
a growth market. One example
is what Americans call concierge
services -- domestic help,
childcare, gardening and decorating.
And on-line retailers are seeing
big increases in sales --
though not, as yet,
profits.
22 A third reaction to
time famine has been the
growth of the work-life debate.
You hear more about people
taking early retirement or
giving up high pressure jobs
in favour of occupations with
shorter working hours. And
bodies such as Britain's
National Work-Life Forum have
sprung up, urging employers to
end the long-hours culture among
managers and to adopt
family-friendly working policies.
23 The trouble with all
these reactions is that
liberating time -- whether by
making better use of it,
buying it from others or
reducing the amount spent at
work -- is futile if the
hours gained are immediately
diverted to other
purposes.
24 As Godbey points out,
the stress we feel arises
not from a shortage of
time, but from the surfeit
of things we try to cram
into it. 'It's the kid in
the candy store,' he says.
'There's just so many good
things to do. The array
of choices is stunning. Our
free time is increasing, but
not as fast as our sense
of the necessary.'
25 A more successful remedy
may lie in understanding the
problem rather than evading it.
26 Before the industrial
revolution, people lived in
small communities with limited
communications. Within the confines
of their village, they could
reasonably expect to know
everything that was to be
known, see everything that was
to be seen, and do
everything that was to be
done.
27 Today, being curious by
nature, we are still trying
to do the same. But the
global village is a world
of limitless possibilities, and
we can never achieve our
aim.
28 It is not more time
we need: it is fewer
desires. We need to switch
off the cell-phone and leave
the children to play by
themselves. We need to buy
less, read less and travel
less. We need to set
boundaries for ourselves, or be
doomed to mounting despair
