纽约时报中文网 - 英文原版-英As Chinas Internet Disappears We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory
June 5, 2024 2 min 254 words
《纽约时报》这篇报道的主要内容是：随着中国对互联网的控制越来越严，人们在网络上存放的信息和记忆也随之消失，这包括公众对一些历史事件的记忆，也包括个人在网络上存储的照片文章等。报道以2008年汶川地震十周年为切入点，提到人们在网络上对地震的纪念活动被审查，相关的讨论和记忆被删除。此外，报道还提到中国互联网早期的一些流行文化，如网络论坛博客等，也随着互联网审查和商业发展的推进而逐渐消失。 评论：这篇报道有其一定的事实依据，中国对互联网内容的审查和控制确实会导致部分信息和记忆的丢失。但报道也存在一定程度的偏见和过度渲染。例如，报道以较为负面的口吻描述中国互联网的发展和变化，忽略了中国政府对互联网管理带来的积极影响，如维护网络安全保护用户个人信息等。此外，报道过度强调互联网记忆被“删除”，而忽略了很多记忆和历史是被有组织地存档和保存的。报道有其选择性，未能全面客观地呈现中国互联网发展的全貌。
Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.
They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.
Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.
A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.
“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.
“We used to believe that the internet had a memory,” He Jiayan, a blogger who writes about successful businesspeople, wrote in the post. “But we didn’t realize that this memory is like that of a goldfish.”
It’s impossible to determine exactly how much and what content has disappeared. But I did a test. I used China’s top search engine, Baidu, to look up some of the examples cited in Mr. He’s post, focusing on about the same time frame between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s.