04.新科技／NEW TECHNOLOGIES

［04］新科技／NEW TECHNOLOGIES

尽管我们很难意识到，但这种页面格式占据着我们，以至于即使新的技术都无法摆脱它。能像书一样翻开的笔记本电脑屏幕是在模仿页面，拇指姑娘仍然用十只或两个拇指在屏幕或手机上书写。一旦她完成写作，便可马上打印出她的作品。每个领域的创新者们都在预订新的电子书，但电子版尚未从书本解放出来，即使它暗示着和书本与跨历史格式完全不同的内容。那些还没被发明的东西，拇指姑娘可以帮助我们。 This page-format so dominates us—though we are hardly aware of it—that even our new technologies have not been able to break away from it. The screen of a laptop computer—which itself opens like a book—mimics the page, and Thumbelina still writes on the screen with ten fingers, or with two thumbs on her smart phone. Once she is finished writing, she can immediately print out her work. Innovators in every domain are heralding the new electronic book, but the electronic has not yet been liberated from the book, even though it implies something completely different from the book and the trans-historical format of the page. What that thing is has yet to be discovered. Thumbelina can help us here.

我记得我几年前，我走在任教30年的斯坦福校园里，在原来的老校区旁惊讶地看到了一座玻璃窗、钢铁混凝的建筑物，被硅谷的亿万富翁建立用来赞助信息科技的发展。实际上，它与这个教了一个多世纪机械工程和中世纪历史的较旧瓦砖建筑相同：相同的地板布局、相同的教室、相同的走廊。始终保持与页面灵感相同的格式。就像最近发生的革命，那些至少与印刷机和写作一样强大的革命发明，并没有改变我们的知识、教育学、或由书籍发明的大学空间本身。 I remember my astonishment when, a few years ago, on the campus of Stanford University, where I have taught for thirty years, a building was erected in steel and concrete, with glass windows, near the old Quadrangle, devoted to information technology and financed by billionaires from nearby Silicon Valley. In effect, it was identical to the older brick buildings on campus where mechanical engineering and medieval history had been taught for more than a century: the same layout of the floors, the same classrooms, the same hallways. Always the same format inspired by the page. As if the recent revolution, at least as powerful as those of the printing press and writing, had changed nothing in our knowledge, or in our pedagogy, or in the space of the university itself, which was invented long ago by and for the book.

不。新技术正迫使我们离开隐含着书本和页面的空间格式。 No. The new technologies are forcing us to leave the spatial format implied by the book and the page.

姜卓含：作者反思了如电子书般的新科技，认为它们只是换汤不换汤，没有形成真正意义上的革新。电子书对我而言只是换了个阅读的媒介而已，其内容与格式没有改变我们的知识体系或大学空间。我们的身体结构已经被最大机械化了，没什么发展空间了。想要革命只能靠软实力，靠生物体的神经系统和认知！作者是在引导我们想地再深一点！到底应该怎么做呢？