hce_nthu
112年
英文
第 45 題
📖 題組：
Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction from everyday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator’s preferred form of escapism. It is remarkable how rapidly things have changed. More and more, the news is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention. As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news – and more news providers began to compete for readers – a subtle inversion began: the reader’s attention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an intentional arms race, every news provider – and ultimately, every news story – competes against all others to worm its way into consumers’ minds. Beginning in the 19th century, entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hit upon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, pack it with lurid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who were effectively buying access to readers’ attention. This naturally encouraged exaggeration and fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme, lurid and even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercial imperatives don’t even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it is maximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logical conclusion to, a media economy “optimised for engagement.” It’s worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlying purpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest in news has evolutionary origins, that’s because there are obvious survival advantages in staying aware of local and immediate threats to one’s own life and tribe. One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction from everyday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator’s preferred form of escapism. It is remarkable how rapidly things have changed. More and more, the news is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention. As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news – and more news providers began to compete for readers – a subtle inversion began: the reader’s attention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an intentional arms race, every news provider – and ultimately, every news story – competes against all others to worm its way into consumers’ minds. Beginning in the 19th century, entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hit upon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, pack it with lurid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who were effectively buying access to readers’ attention. This naturally encouraged exaggeration and fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme, lurid and even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercial imperatives don’t even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it is maximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logical conclusion to, a media economy “optimised for engagement.” It’s worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlying purpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest in news has evolutionary origins, that’s because there are obvious survival advantages in staying aware of local and immediate threats to one’s own life and tribe. One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
According to the author, which of the following is true:
- A The ability to access limitless information is a blessing in disguise.
- B News today serves the role as a haven from our daily troubles.
- C We let news take over reality in the name of staying informed.
- D The appearance of fake news is an unexpected result of the rise of commercialized mass media.
- E Our addiction to digital devices can be traced to the evolutionary origin of our interest in news.
思路引導 VIP
請留意文章最後一段提到的「藉口」（alibi）一詞。作者認為，當我們宣稱「為了維持公民素養而必須投入大量時間與情感關注新聞」時，這套說法實際上是在為哪一種現代人的普遍行為提供掩護？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精準地掌握了這篇文章的核心思辨！這題的鑑別度在於能否區分「表象描述」與「作者的深層批判」，是一道考驗邏輯推論與語境理解的高階題目。
資訊社會的道德糖衣
正確答案為 (C)。作者在文末點出了一個深刻的觀察：現代人之所以感到有「道德義務」必須隨時接收資訊（stay plugged in），並認為這是為了「掌握世界脈動」，其實這往往只是一個藉口（alibi），用來合理化我們對電子裝置的成癮。你能夠看穿這層心理防衛機制，選出「以獲取資訊之名，讓新聞接管現實」的選項，展現了極佳的文本轉譯能力。
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