2. 外语
  3. Charles Wang has been to e-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman

Charles Wang has been to e-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman

admin2013-07-02  61
问题     Charles Wang has been to e-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman of Computer Associates International, a software company, he first heard how quickly his employees had embraced their new electronic-mail system. They were sending messages to one another like crazy. "I said, ’ Wonderful,’ " recalls Wang. "And I also said, ’Let’s check into how people are using it. ’"

    But instead of a pleasant e-mail culture, what had evolved was a behavioral nightmare. "It was a disaster," he says. "My managers were getting 200 to 300 e-mails a day each. People were so fond of it they weren’t talking to each other. They were hibernating, e-mailing people in the next room. They were abusing it. " In just a few years, Wang’s high-tech communications system had gone crazy.
    To stop the insanity, Wang short-circuited the system, taking the astonishing step — considering what his $3.9 billion company does for a living — of banning all e-mails from 9: 30 a. m. to 12 noon and from 1: 30 p. m. to 4 p. m. These hours are now rigidly observed as a sort of electronic quiet time. Says Wang: "It worked wonderfully. People are walking the corridors again talking to other people. "
    So much for the e-mail revolution, which is now enslaving all those employees it was supposed to free, creating communication problems so new that they cannot be found in the pages of any management textbook. E-mail has corrupted corporate cultures and created bosses who turn e-mail into a terror weapon to subdue underlings and undermine rivals. E-mail has wasted years of executive time and gigabytes(十亿字节)of computer memory looking for lost keys.
    And the volume of traffic is still exploding. In 1994, for example, 776 billion e-mail messages moved through U. S. -based computer networks. As of 1997 that number is expected to more than triple, to 2. 6 trillion. By the year 2000, the number will nearly triple again, to 6. 6 trillion. Forty percent of the American workforce uses e-mail.
    So why are people saying such bad things about these computer-borne text message? Almost everyone agrees that e-mail is a wonderful invention. It is a convenient, highly democratic, informal medium for conveying messages that conforms well to human needs. E-mail is perhaps the ideal means by which one can run a global project. "It is one of the greatest innovations of the last 20 years, " says Paul Argenti, a professor of management communications at Dartmouth’s Tuck School. But Argenti and others also say it is a medium whose function is confusing, in parts because the process is so easy and informal that people treat it as they do conversation. But informal as it may be, e-mail is writing and constitutes a permanent record. And because so much of human conversation is nonverbal, e-mail messages, especially critical or complex ones, can easily be misinterpreted.
According to the passage, the e-mail is invented to______.
选项 A、encourage people to communicate more frequently
B、make people subject to computer-borne messages
C、enable people to run some global businesses
D、liberate people from traditional communication
答案D
解析 事实细节题。第四段首句which定语从句中it was supposed to free是修饰employees的，由was和is这两个be动词的时态对比，可知此处将人们从传统的交流问题中解放出来是电子邮件的初衷，故选项[D]正确。[A]、[B]没有提及；[C]不是普遍的目的。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/Wcn7777K
0

大学英语六级

相关试题推荐
随机试题
最新回复(0)