2. 职称英语
  3. (1) There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape

(1) There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape

游客2023-10-21  23
问题     (1) There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape: concentration of media, and new ways for the powerful to game it.
    (2) First, we increasingly turn to only a few aggregators like Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s going on the world, which makes their decisions about what to show us impossibly fraught. Those aggregators draw—opaquely (不透明地) while consistently—from largely undifferentiated sources to figure out what to show us. They are, they often remind regulators, only aggregators rather than content originators or editors.
    (3) Second, the opacity (不透明性) by which these platforms offer us news and set our information agendas means that we don’t have cues about whether what we see is representative of sentiment at large, or for that matter of anything, including expert consensus (共识). But expert outsiders can still game the system to ensure disproportionate attention to the propaganda they want to inject into public discourse. Those users might employ bots, capable of numbers that swamp actual people, and of persistence that ensures their voices are heard above all others while still appearing to be humbly part of the real crowd.
    (4) What to do about it? We must realize that the market for vital information is not merely a market.
    (5) The ideals of the journalistic profession—no doubt flawed in practice, but nonetheless worthy— helped mitigate (缓和) an earlier generation of concentration of media ownership. News divisions were by strong tradition independent of the commercial side of broadcasting and publishing, while cross-subsidized by other programming. And in the United States, they were largely independent of government, too, with exceptions flagrantly (明目张胆地) sticking out.
    (6) Facebook and Twitter for social media, and Google and Microsoft for search, must recognize a special responsibility for the parts of their services that host or inform public discourse. They should be upfront about how they promote some stories and de-emphasize others, instead of treating their ranking systems as trade secrets. We should hold them to their desire to be platforms rather than editors by insisting that they allow anyone to write and share algorithms (演算法) for creating user feeds, so that they aren’t saddled with the impossible task of making a single perfect feed for everyone.
    (7) There should be a method for non-personally-identifying partial disclosure: my Twitter-mates could be assured, say, that I am, in fact, a person, and from what country I hail, even if I don’t choose to advertise my name. Bots can be allowed—but should be known for the mere silhouettes (侧面影像) that they are.
    (8) And Facebook and Twitter should version-up the crude levers of user interaction that have created a parched, flattening, even infantilizing discourse. For example, why not have, in addition to "like, " a "Voltaire, " a button to indicate respect for a point—while disagreeing with it? Or one to indicate a desire to know if a shared item is in fact true, an invitation to librarians and others to offer more context as it becomes available, flagged later for the curious user?
    (9) Finally, it’s time for a reckoning with the bankrupt system of click-based advertising. By "bankrupt" I don’t mean that it’s bad for America or the world, though it is. Rather, by its own terms it is replete with fraud. The same bots that populate Twitter armies also inspire clicks that are meaningless—money out of the pockets of advertisers, with no human impact to show for it. There are thoughtful proposals to reseed a media landscape of genuine and diverse voices, and we would do well to experiment widely with them as the clickbait architecture collapses on its own accord.
    (10) While there is no baseline (基线) pure or neutral architecture for discourse, there are better and worse ones, and the one we have now is being exploited by those with the means and patience to game it. It’s time to reorient what we have with a focus on loyalty to users—honestly satisfying their curiosity and helping them find and engage with others in ways so that disagreement does not entail doxxing (人肉搜索) and threats, but rather reinforcement of the human aspiration to understand our world and our fellow strugglers within it. (本文选自 The Atlantic) [br] What could be the most appropriate title for the passage?
选项 A、How Online Platforms Shape American Discourse
B、American Journalistic Profession Should Take Their Responsibility
C、The Current Problems with the US Media
D、What Facebook and Twitter Should Do Today
答案 A
解析 主旨题。解答本题应通览全文，并辨清文章结构。文章前三段通过介绍美国新闻和信息领域存在的两大问题引出聚合类网站对美国公众话语的影响。接着作者建议这些网站应为自己主导并影响公共话语的这部分服务承担特殊责任。然后作者分别指出脸书和推特的粗糙用户交互方式以及点击广告体系对公共话语的影响。最后作者强调应该重新调整我们所拥有的话语架构基线，把重点放在对用户的忠诚上。综合考虑，A“在线平台如何影响美国公众话语”最接近全文主旨，故A为答案。B“美国新闻从业人员应该承担起他们的责任”、C“美国媒体的现有问题”和D“脸书与推特如今该怎么做”在原文均有提及，但并非文章主旨，故排除。
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