Unit 3 Under the sea reading课时作业

I.阅读理解

　　To some, Facebook, Twitter and similar social-media platforms are the highest level of communication-better, even, than face-to-face conversations, since more people can be involved. Others think of them more as something that leads to self-appreciation, threatens privacy and reduces intelligent conversations to the exchange of rude memes. They might even, these kinds of arguments go, be creating a generation of electronic addicts who are incapable of reflective, individual, original thought.

　　A topic ripe for anthropological (人类学的) study, then. And such a study, the "Why We Post (发帖)" project, has just been published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London.

　　The participants in "Why We Post" worked independently for 15 months at locations in Brazil, Britain, Chile, China (one rural and one industrial site), India, Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey. They buried themselves within families and their surrounding communities.That, the team believes, let them form a subtle view of the roles of social media in their study sites which could not be gained by analysing participants' public postings. These by-standers' viewpoints deny much received wisdom. One of the biggest doubts is the "selfie"-which is often blamed for causing self-regard and too much focus on attractiveness. "Why We Post", however, reveals that the selfie itself has many faces. In Brazil many selfies posted by men were taken at the gym. But at the British site, Dr Miller found, school children posted five times as many "groupies" (images of the picture-taker with friends) as they did selfies. Britons have also created a category called "uglies" (曝丑照), of which the purpose is to take as ugly a self-image as possible.

The often-humorous, marked-up images known as memes have also come in for criticism. They lower down traditional forms of public debate, spreading far and wide with little context. But memes serve different purposes in different cultures. In India they tend to focus on serious and religious issues;Trinidadian memes are more often send-ups of politicians. Yet in all cases Dr Miller sees meme-passing not as limiting what social media users think and say, but as enabling