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  3. Any downtime such as the Easter weekend break takes me back to the summer of

Any downtime such as the Easter weekend break takes me back to the summer of

游客2025-01-11  23
问题     Any downtime such as the Easter weekend break takes me back to the summer of 2007 when I went on holiday and nearly died. It was the year the iPhone was born. The world was beginning to gorge on the gold rush of the Internet, social networks and mobile phones—the so called "triple revolution". I was no exception. With a new business and a new baby, I was exhausted. Whenever possible, I was going online in a world which, a decade on, posts more than 6,000 tweets a second, where 60% of Britons are on Facebook and 14m of us are on Instagram.
    There is a cost to all this connectedness and being "always on". In 2007, arriving in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, famous for its lack of technology as much as its shingle shore, I went for a gentle jog along the beach to get in the holiday mood. Yet I felt myself grinding to a halt. I had ignored a cold for months. Now I had the strange sensation that I was filling up with the shingle beneath me. Dragging myself back to the cottage, I muttered: "I think I have overdone it." My husband and our children looked on with scepticism: wasn’t I just incapable of switching off? Three days later I was in Ipswich Hospital with pneumonia and sepsis. I was a few hours from all my organs shutting down.
    During my recovery I mulled on what had happened to me and whether I was uniquely bad at managing my life. I began to notice there was something unhealthy about this new era of "infobesity" and time poverty which has steadily worsened. I’ve been studying the effects of connectedness and its discontents and have been devising strategies to counteract the impact that the Age of Overload is having on our health. I’m now publishing my findings about what I call "social health". In it I recommend ways in which we can get the best of the fully connected era and not suffer its worst excesses. I have started by looking at the history of connectedness itself. The human has fought to become "king of the jungle" in 200,000 short years. But in just an evolutionary nanosecond—150 years—we have jumped into an entirely new era. Everything from the telephone to central heating and, of course, the computer has transformed us for ever.
    Yet we are seeing a society and a "system" that are not, for want of a better word, healthy. Evidence shows we are not happier, more productive, or always safer: more than 10m working days a year in the UK are lost to "stress", anxiety and depression and global productivity is stagnant and, if anything, falling. Now that we live cheek by jowl with a new species, technology, we must preserve the very essence of what makes us human and which led us to the top of the animal kingdom; our instincts, our communication skills, our organisational abilities. They can be complemented but not comprehensively outsourced to technology or we pay a price: inefficiency, inaccuracy, incompetence. And disaffection, low productivity, stress and economic weakness.
    Yet we all hurtle on. The Road Runner Show cartoon tells a smart bird outruns the hapless Wile E Coyote who chases him, overrunning the cliff edge, legs spinning hopelessly in perpetuity. It is useful to look at the postwar period because that is when the modern concept of health was first conceived with the creation of the World Health Organization (WHO). Within its original definition is the goal of physical and mental health, "not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". It refers to "social well-being" but with no detail.  We need an updated definition fit for purpose in this century.
    What exactly is social health? It means managing all forms of connectedness, online and offline. It means getting our "diet" of information from people as much as from algorithms. It means developing habits around connectedness—much as we do around keeping fit and watching what we eat. It means managing your networks as systematically as you would your finances. And it means one thing above all: managing your time and your diary like you do your body. Choose carefully what exactly goes in it. Social health is both a mindset and a behaviour; it is having trusted sources to find out what you need to know. Strong and diverse networks are crucial to social health and very different from the "work the room" association of old-style networking. Social health means having networks where you meet people who might challenge you, teach you, inspire you, not just help you get on and up. Social health means not believing everything you read or thinking that being on Facebook is better than being face to face.
    Today we all know the difference between a carb and a protein, how to value our sleep intake, our alcohol consumption. We can copy what we have achieved in mental and physical health and adapt it to develop social health. My own antidote? I have a weekly "techno Shabbat" when I go offline and reconnect only in real time, with real people, and real conversations. I favour small, intimate networks over large ones and I control my information intake just like my Easter eggs: in moderation. [br] Which of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?
选项 A、The Age of Overload is rapidly harming both our mental and physical health.
B、Social health should be closely connected to mental and physical health.
C、The triple revolution is causing the separation of the real world and the virtual world.
D、We should and can find ways to survive and thrive in an Age of Overload.
答案 D
解析
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