Everything I know about the Internet, I learned from my 87-year-old mother.
我对于互联网的了解，都是来自于87岁的老妈。
Like, the harder you hit “Send,” the faster the email travels. If you want wholly to colonize your reader’s subconscious, just end your email or text right in the middle of the. If you’re still not sure your reader is fully invested, simPLY LEAN ON YOUR CAPS LOCK TO IMBUE YOUR MISSIVE WITH A THROBBING IMMEDIACY.
比如，点“发送”键点得越用力，邮件就发送得越快。如果你想完全占据收件人的潜意识，那么把the写到一半就结束邮件或短信。如果你仍不能确定收信人是否全情投入，只需在一个单词没写完就切换成大写，让你的信件充满令人震撼的紧迫性。

But Mom’s larger message is that the Internet and cellphones have created a kind of tyranny of connectedness: Even those of us who don’t have small children or jobs with the State Department, it seems, now need to be accessible at all hours of the day. It’s as if we’re doctors on call.
不过，妈妈对互联网和手机更宏观的理解是，它们制造出一种相互联系的暴政：如今，连我们这些没有小孩或不在国务院工作的人也似乎需要能够全天候保持联系。好像我们是随时待命的医生。
Like Madonna confessing that during her marriage to Guy Ritchie each kept a BlackBerry tucked under their pillows at night, we have to keep up standards. If you go to the theater and discover your phone has died, you better borrow a seat mate’s phone and pre-emptively call the last five people you spoke to; if there’s a glitch in Gmail, you better start checking all your other portals with an assiduousness that verges on the robotic.
麦当娜(Madonna)承认，在她和盖伊·里奇(Guy Ritchie)的婚姻期间，晚上两人枕头底下都放着一部黑莓手机。我们也要达到标准。如果去剧院发现手机没电了，最好借邻座的手机，先给最近通话的五个人打电话说一声。如果Gmail邮箱出了点小故障，最好马上查看其他所有的门户网站，在这方面应该像机器人一样勤勉。
In my own effort to stay afloat the data surf, I subscribe to two policies. First, if it takes me more than 24 hours to respond to an email, I’ll apologize to the sender; after a day, the failure to respond betrays disinterest, concern or alcohol poisoning.
为了在数字世界里立于不败之地，我给自己定了两条规矩：第一，如果超过24小时没有回复邮件，我会给发信人道歉。因为超过一天不回复，对方会以为我没兴趣、不关心或者酒精中毒了。
Second, in the intimacy-based communications hierarchy (with a face-to-face meeting or a phone call being at the top, and tying a message to a rock and then burying the rock in the dirt being at the bottom), I try always to meet the incoming vehicle at its level or higher. You can’t answer a phone call with a message on FarmVille.
第二，在以亲密关系为基础的交流等级中（面对面沟通或打电话属于最高级别，用石头来传递信息属于最低级别），我总是努力以同等或更高的交流级别回复对方。对方要是打电话，你就不能在FarmVille上发消息回复。
My methods seem to work well enough. But daily I see others struggle. “I was in the recording studio the other day,” the producer and jazz trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis said. “I’d hired five musicians. We were in the studio for seven or eight hours. One of the musicians was 100 percent committed, no interruptions. He will be hired again. By contrast the bassist stayed on his phone throughout the session, doing social media. He will only be hired again if I can’t find someone else.”
我的原则似乎收到了不错的效果。但是我每天都能看到其他人的挣扎。“有一天，我在录音棚里，”制作人、爵士乐长号手戴尔菲尤·马萨利斯(Delfeayo Marsalis)说，“我雇了五位乐手。我们在录音棚里待了七八个小时。其中一位乐手全神贯注，没有受到任何干扰。下次我肯定还会雇佣他。相比之下，那位贝斯手在录音过程中一直看手机，玩社交媒体。以后我只会在找不到其他人的情况下，才会雇佣他。”
Asked what dark, tangled forces may have prompted the bassist’s behavior, Mr. Marsalis said: “There’s a fear that: ‘Hey, I’m doing this session with you, but another guy might call me and give me a gig that pays $10 an hour. I can’t miss that call.’ ”
当被问及那位贝斯手是出于什么阴暗复杂的考虑才做出那种行为时，马萨利斯说，“我觉得他是这样想的：‘嘿，这次我是和你一起录音，但是别人可能会给我打电话，提供每小时10美元的现场演出机会。我不能错过那样的电话。’”
When she was a sophomore at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2011, Elisabeth Chramer and her communications class were asked by their professor to refrain from any cellphone or electronic use for 72 hours.
2011年，伊丽莎白·克拉默(Elisabeth Chramer)在亚拉巴马大学伯明翰分校上大二。当时，通讯课的教授要求班上的学生72小时不使用手机或其他任何电子设备。
“There were a few students who could not complete the assignment,” she said. “They just could not isolate themselves.” Ms. Chramer, who now operates her own customized embroidery company, added that one of the huge challenges of communicating with members of her generation is their varied response time: “It’s either instantaneous or it’s a week later. People go from platform to platform. You have to catch them while they’re on a certain platform, or you wait a week.”
“有几位同学无法完成老师布置的这项任务，”她说，“他们就是无法把自己与其他人隔离起来。”克拉默现在经营自己的订制刺绣公司。她补充说，跟她这一代人沟通的一个巨大挑战是，每个人的回复时间不同：“有的是立即回复，有的是一周后回复。人们在不同的沟通平台之间切换。你必须在他们在某个平台上时联系上他们，否则就得等一星期。”
The more messaging platforms and types of social media that we welcome into the world, the more our communication skills are scattered and made diffuse; every year, we have ever-sophisticated ways to approach the microphone and mumble, “’Sup?” Thus it’s interesting to see the workarounds that people use to keep their interactions from dissolving into a meaningless spray of pixels.
我们接受的信息平台和社交媒体种类越多，我们的沟通方式就变得越分散。每年，我们对着麦克风咕哝“什么事？”时所借助的平台变得越来越复杂多样。所以，有趣的是，人们开始使用各种变通方式，防止相互交流变得太过分散，失去意义。
The entrepreneur and philanthropist John Paul DeJoria, a founder of the Patrón Spirits Company and the Paul Mitchell line of hair care products, does not use email even though he presides over a multibillion-dollar empire.
企业家、慈善家约翰·保罗·德约里尔(John Paul DeJoria)是培恩烈酒公司(Patrón Spirits Company)和宝美奇(Paul Mitchell)护发产品公司的创始人。尽管他管理着一个价值数十亿美元的帝国，但他从不使用电子邮件。
“I would be so inundated that I wouldn’t be able to get off the computer,” he said. “My executive director only brings me messages that are important. I teach the people around me to pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many.”
“否则我将被邮件淹没，无法从电脑前脱身，”他说，“我的执行理事只把重要消息转达给我。我教导我身边的人只关注少数至关重要的事，忽略很多无关紧要的事。”
Mr. DeJoria added: “A personal phone call to someone means the world. Or if somebody writes me a letter and there’s enough room on that letter, I will handwrite my answer on the letter and either mail it back or, if they have a fax, fax it to them.”
德约里尔补充说，“亲自打电话意义重大。或者，要是有人给我写了一封信，信的下方还有足够的空间，我会在空白处回复，然后把信寄回去，或者要是对方有传真，就传真过去。”
Mr. Marsalis, who wrote a children’s book “No Cell Phone Day” about a father and daughter who spend the best day of their lives when they temporarily put aside mobile technology, said that he often imposes restrictions on his 14-year-old daughter and her friends.
马萨利斯写过一本童书，名叫《无手机日》(No Cell Phone Day)，讲述的一对父女暂时抛开移动技术，度过了人生中最美好的一天。他说，他经常对14岁的女儿和她的朋友们在使用手机方面加以约束。
“I won’t allow cellphones in the car,” he said. “When her cousins come to visit, I tell their parents, ‘Your child will not be available to you for the next four hours.’ ” Mr. Marsalis said the parents’ reaction is usually rhapsodic.
“我不允许在车里使用手机，”他说，“她的堂（表）兄弟姐妹来我家玩时，我会对他们的父母说，‘在接下来的四个小时里，你们将跟孩子联系不上。’”马萨利斯说，那些父母们的反应通常是狂喜。
But workarounds, of course, can work around in the other direction, too.
当然，也有其他一些变通方式。
When Washingtonian magazine published an article in January about Green Bank, W.Va., where wireless Internet is outlawed because the town is host to a high-tech government telescope “so sensitive that it can pick up the energy equivalent of a single snowflake hitting the ground,” the magazine also reported that, according to one seventh grader, many children in the area connect to home Wi-Fi networks and then use the texting functions in Facebook and Snapchat to talk to their friends.
今年1月，《华盛顿人》(Washingtonian)杂志发表了一篇文章，讲述的是西弗吉尼亚州的绿岸(Green Bank)。在那里，无线网络是非法的，因为该镇是一架政府的高科技望远镜的所在地，这架望远镜“非常灵敏，连雪花触地大小的能量都能捕获”。该杂志还报道说，据一位七年级学生说，该地区的很多孩子连上家里的无线网络，然后用Facebook和Snapchat上的短信功能与朋友交谈。
Genaro Cortez, a lawyer in San Antonio, said that he once told all his clients that he was going to a criminal law conference in San Diego, and then set up an automatic Out of the Office email to the same effect. Nevertheless, during the conference, one of his clients texted him about a hearing scheduled for the following week. Mr. Cortez said that in this instance he responded because the question posed was legitimate and didn’t inconvenience him.
赫纳罗·科尔特斯(Genaro Cortez)是圣安东尼奥市的一位律师。他说，有一次，他告诉所有的客户，他要去圣迭戈参加一个刑法大会，他还给邮件设置了“不在办公室”的自动回复。尽管如此，在大会期间，他的一个客户还是给他发短信，告诉他一场听证会安排在接下来的一周举行。科尔特斯说，在这种情况下，他回复了，因为那位客户提出的问题是合理的，没有给他带来不便。
“But it’s a matter of degree,” he said, “so long as the person texting or emailing doesn’t abuse the issue by contacting multiple times on frivolous matters.”
“但是，这有一个度的问题，”他说，“只要发短信或邮件的人没有就无关紧要的事情多次联系就行。”
In the end, it may be all but impossible to keep ourselves from scattering our online attentions to the point of meaninglessness.
说到底，我们几乎不可能不分散在网上的注意力，甚至达到毫无意义的地步。
Eschewing the Internet altogether is an option. My mother estimates that about half the seniors in her retirement community aren’t online. “A lot of them are scared to death by the whole idea, by the infernal machine,” she told me. “You know the pathetic fallacy, where you ascribe human qualities to nonhuman things? It’s that. They ascribe human qualities to the computer. Like the computer is going to reach out and grab them.”
完全避开互联网也是一种选择。我妈妈估计，在她的退休社区里，约有一半老年人不上网。“他们很多人对互联网这个概念感到害怕，觉得它像定时炸弹，”她对我说，“你知道感情误置吧？就是把人的特质投射到无生命的东西上。就是这种情况。他们把人的特质投射到电脑上。好像电脑会伸出手抓住他们。”
They’re entirely right.
他们没错。