考研英语阅读理解分享：太多的嗡嗡声_大学英语阅读

考研英语阅读理解分享：太多的嗡嗡声

　　The Army of Davids argumentto borrow a phrase from Glenn Reynolds, an American bloggeris often applied to politics. For example, Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Russian Duma, argues that social media make it easier for protesters in Russia to organise. (Russians spend more time on the internet than western Europeans, not least because they have no faith in state television.) This is true, but the secret police in many countries are equally excited about technology. New tools allow them to eavesdrop retrospectively, and to trace networks of dissidents. During the Egyptian uprising the advantage was clearly on the side of the dissidents, since the Egyptian secret police were digital dullards. But this may not be the case in China, where the regimes online snoops are highly sophisticated.

　　Cyber-enthusiasts gush about the way social media help entrepreneurs. They have a point: disruptive technologies reconfigure old businesses and create new ones. Facebook could let companies aim their ads more accurately. Firms are starting to use internal social-networking tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, to encourage collaboration, discover talent and cut down on pointless e-mails. Youngsters are happy to embrace it, but older managers may be less keen. The use of social media within companies could be quite disruptive to traditional management techniques, particularly in strongly hierarchical firms.

　　Dreaming up new companies is not terribly difficult: at the conference Andreas Weigend, the founder of Social Data Lab, came up with the idea of another persons hat a product that allows you to don the digital identity of, say, an Islamic fundamentalist and see what the world looks like through his eyes. This sounds neat, but some of the new social-media technologies have a clown-suit quality to them. They are amusing the first time, but rapidly become tedious.