2. 外语
  3. The Internet has spawned (大量输出) a sick new craze: violence porn. Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg had three awful things in common

The Internet has spawned (大量输出) a sick new craze: violence porn. Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg had three awful things in common

admin2010-04-30  24
问题     The Internet has spawned (大量输出) a sick new craze: violence porn.
    Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg had three awful things in common. Both were Jewish Americans who were kidnapped by Islamic terrorists. Both were beheaded (斩首). And both had their excruciating (剧烈的) deaths recorded and then replayed thousands, perhaps millions, of times over the Internet. One of the websites that featured the killing of Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted in Pakistan in 2002, was also among the first to post the footage of Berg’s execution two years later in Iraq. "Yes, we have the American beheading video," its home page proudly declared.
    Is this a website sponsored by militant Islamists? Nope. It’s a site based here in the United States with the sole mission of celebrating stomach-turning violence. Under the motto "Can You Handle Life?" the site displays hundreds of images of dead, dying and mangled human beings. Some of its recent offerings were listed under titles such as "Shocking Murder Images," "Suicide by Grenade" and "People Who Drowned".
    The Internet is fall of such fare. Another site boasts that it "collects images and information... to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience." True enough, since among the site’s recent photos was one of a man being hit by a car, and another of the grotesque remains of a person killed by a shotgun blast. Then there’s a "celebrity morgue" site that posts photos of famous people dead at crime scenes and on autopsy tables. There’s even a website that reviews violence-filled sites, praising one for "videos of people jumping from buildings, dying by fire and explosion and guns, and otherwise suffering," and another for showing "disease, executions, murder, deformity, vivisection, accidents, genocide." You can sense the reviewer’s glee when he writes, "OK, gross-out fans, strap on your seat belts!"
    It’s not news to anyone that the Internet is awash (泛滥的) with pornography. But videos like the Nick Berg murder are a reminder that there’s something even more disturbing now spreading across the Web. Call it "violence porn" —the latest degradation of our popular culture, in which gruesome (毛骨悚然的) injuries and deaths are glorified and presented in wincing (抽搐的) detail. Such imagery leads to "an increasing desensitization (迟钝) to violence which carries over into the real world," says Dave Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family. More bluntly, it’s like an invitation to mass psychosis.
    And make no mistake, viewing true-life violence is catching on. According to the operator of one of these sites, his traffic has multiplied over the last several years from a few thousand visitors a day to more than 150,000.
    With a simple click of the mouse, anyone can take a gander (一瞥) at someone else’s nightmare. The site that posted the shotgun victim says that 250,000 individuals peruse their web pages each day. When one schoolteacher wrote the site to complain that students had bookmarked it on their computers, the posted reply said, "The Net is not a baby-sitter!" and blamed the problem on children "roaming the Net unsupervised."
    Meanwhile, a recent University of Michigan study revealed that steady exposure as a child to violent screen images can make young adults more likely to turn to violence themselves. "I have no doubt that our culture today has a coarsening effect," says Joanne Cantor, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
"The more you live in a world where violence and hostility are the norm, the more you adopt a hostile mental framework,"
    Some even suggest that the pictures of American soldiers posed smiling alongside abused Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison are a reflection of the increased callousness in our society. One columnist wrote in New Hampshire’s Union Lesder newspaper: "We’d be missing a few dots if we didn’t admit that the culture that birthed our young soldiers has dumbed down the definition of human dignity."
    But the violence porn peddlers don’t care. Many axe turning a big profit, thanks to ads on their websites, as well as videos, T-shirts and other merchandise. They also dress up their voyeurism (偷窥癖) in free-speech clothing.
    "Privacy rights have to take a second place to First Amendment flee-speech rights," says Lawrence Walters, a lawyer who has represented several violence and porn websites. "The deceased, quite frankly, don’t have a continued privacy right."
    Good to know. But whatever happened to respecting the dead? And what about relatives of people who turn up in gruesome pictures on the Internet?
    One website heard from a family claiming a photo showed the mangled body of their nephew, who had killed himself by getting in the path of a train. The site posted this cruel response: "We ask that, in the future, this family conduct their suicides in a less public manner."
    Some Internet filters can help shield children from sites like this, but face it: It’s easy for kids to find a friend with an unfiltered computer. So for now, there is no real answer. Not as long as people like Lawrence Walters shrug off the voyeurism by saying, "We like to know what other people do good, bad or ugly." Apparently, in the no-roles world of the Internet, this is supposed to be a wonderful thing. Instead, it’s a warning that we’re neck-deep in slime, and sinking fast.
What does the author mean by "dress up their voyeurism in free-speech clothing"?
选项 A、Justify the evil nature of their business by claiming they have the right of press freedom.
B、Cover their dirty deals by offering free products.
C、Blame others for their own fault.
D、Distract public attention by giving free speech so that their strange behaviors can be forgotten.
答案A
解析 考查对原文句意的诠释。只有A选项最符合原句。
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