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这条沟有点深
1、A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide — the division of the world into the info(information) rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital divide. There are reasons to be optimistic.
今天,人们十分关注所谓的是信息差异问题——世界上信息资源丰富的地区和信息资源贫乏的地区之间的差异;这个差异确实存在,我和我妻子20年前就曾谈及这个临近的危险。然而,那时还不太明显的是一些抵制信息差异的、新的积极因素。实际上我们是完全有理由感到乐观的。
2、There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access — after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we've ever had.
一些技术上的因素使我们有理由期望差异会缩小。随着互联网的日趋商业化,上网普及对商家是有利的——毕竟,上网人数越多,潜在的客户就越多。越来越多的政府,惟恐自己的国家落后,纷纷推广互联网的普及。一二十年之内,全球将有一二十亿人互联。因此,我认为在未来的数年中,信息差异将缩小而不会变大。那是好消息,因为互联网很可能成为我们消除所面临的贫困的最强有效的工具。
3、Of course, the use of the Internet isn't the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential.
当然,使用互联网不是惟一消灭贫困的方法。互联网也不是我们所拥有的惟一工具,但它却有巨大的潜力。
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