数字时代中英文演讲稿

一年前，阿巴·达韦萨AbhaDawesar生活在飓风桑迪过后断电的曼哈顿，为上

网四处找电充。作为一个小说家，她从中发现其隐喻：在生活深度与数字世界连结的同时，我们是否错过了真实世界？

I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy, and this little white dog called Maui was staying with me. Half the city was dark because of a power cut, and I was living on the dark side.Now, Maui was terrified of the dark, so I had to carry him up the stairs, actually down the stairs first, for his walk, and then bring him back up. I was also hauling gallons of bottles of water up to the seventh floor every day. And through all of this, I had to hold a torch between my teeth. The stores nearby were out of flashlights and batteries and bread. For a shower, I walked 40 blocks to a branch of my gym.

当飓风桑迪来袭时，我正在纽约和一只名叫毛伊的小白狗待在一起由于停电，半个城市处于黑暗中我当时就在黑暗(停电)的这一边毛伊非常怕黑我只好把它抱上楼实际上是先带下楼去遛再把它抱回来我每天还要将数加仑的瓶装水艰难地拖到七楼而且同时我还得牙咬着手电照明。附近商店里的手电筒，电池和面包早已售罄为了洗个澡，我得走40个路口到一个健身中心去。

But these were not the major preoccupations of my day. It was just as critical for me to be the first person in at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers to juice my multiple devices. I started to prospect under the benches of bakeries and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points. I wasn't the only one. Even in the rain, people stood between Madison and 5th Avenue under their umbrellas charging their cell phones from outlets on the street.Nature had just reminded us that it was stronger than all our technology, and yet here we were, obsessed about being wired.

但这些并不是我一天中最重要的任务对我来说同样重要的还有能否第一个带上充电线到附近的一家咖啡馆给我的多个设备充电。我开始寻找面包店长椅下和糕点店入口处的那些插座我并不是唯一一个即使下着雨，也有人打着雨伞站在麦迪逊和第五大道之间的街边插座旁等着自己的手机充电大自然提醒着我们它比所有的技术来的强大但我们仍然沉迷于上网。

I think there's nothing like a crisis to tell you what's really important and what's not, and Sandy made me realize that our devices and their connectivity matter to us right up there with food and shelter. The self as we once knew it no longer exists, and I think that an abstract, digital universe has become a part of our identity, and I want to talk to you about what I think that means.

我认为没有什么能够比一场危机更能告诉你事物的轻重缓急飓风桑迪使我认识到我们的电子设备及其通讯功能对我的重要程度就如食物和住所一般我们

所熟知的一部分自己已经不复存在而一个抽象的数字的世界已经成为了我们

身份的一部分我想谈谈这意味着什么

I'm a novelist, and I'm interested in the self because the self and fiction have a lot in common. They're both stories, interpretations. You and I can experience things without a story. We might run up the stairs too quickly and we might get breathless. But the larger sense that we have of our lives, the slightly more abstract one, is indirect. Our story of our life is based on direct experience, but it's embellished. A novel needs scene after scene to build, and the story of our life needs an arc as well. It needs months and years. Discrete moments from our lives are its chapters. But the story is not about these chapters. It's the whole book. It's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness, the victories and the disappointments, but it's because how because of these, and sometimes, more importantly, in spite of these, we find our place in the world and we change it and we change ourselves.Our story, therefore, needs two dimensions of time: a long arc of time that is our lifespan,and the timeframe of direct experience that is the moment. Now the self that experiences directly can only exist in the moment, but the one that narrates needs several moments, a whole sequence of them, and that's why our full sense of self needs both immersive experience and the flow of time. Now, the flow of time is embedded in everything, in the erosion of a grain of sand, in the budding of a little bud into a rose. Without it, we would have no music. Our own emotions and state of mind often encode time, regret or nostalgia about the past, hope or dread about the future.

我是一个小说家，我对关于“自我”的话题感兴趣因为“自我”和小说有很多共同点他们都属于一种故事和诠释你和我可以不通过故事体验事情我们可能爬楼梯爬得太快我们可能呼吸困难但我们越是深入地感受我们的生活就越是

感受到其抽象和不直接我们关于生活的故事都来自于经历但是修饰过的小说需要一个接一个的场景来完成我们生活的故事同样需要一道时间跨度需要数

月甚至数年的独立生活场景来组成一个个章节但故事并不是仅仅是这些章节

而是整整一本书不仅仅是伤心和愉悦也不仅仅是胜利和失望而是所有的前因后果有时候，也许更加重要的是，尽管有此种种我们寻找自己在世界中的位置然后改变这个位置，改变自我我们的故事，因此，需要一个二维的时间轴：一个是我们整个的生命以及另一个就是直接经历的时间片段便是某个时刻现在直接经历的那个“自我” 只存在于某个时刻但一个故事需要多个时刻组成多个有序的时刻这就是为何完整的“自我”认识同时包括深入地体验和时间的流逝时间的流逝镌刻于每一件事情中无论是一粒沙尘的消逝还是一朵玫瑰的

缓缓绽放没有时间的流逝，我们无法获得音乐我们自己的情绪和意识往往同时间紧密相连无论是对过去的悔恨或怀念或是对未来的希望和担心

I think that technology has altered that flow of time. The overall time that we have for our narrative, our lifespan, has been increasing, but the smallest measure, the moment, has shrunk. It has shrunk because our