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  3. Our social relationships are changing and technology is at the centre of this unfolding story. Take stock of your own world. You

Our social relationships are changing and technology is at the centre of this unfolding story. Take stock of your own world. You

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问题     Our social relationships are changing and technology is at the centre of this unfolding story. Take stock of your own world. You probably have a few family members and friends who mean the world to you. Then there are the many acquaintances, contacts, "followers" and "consequential strangers" who you only interact with occasionally but who serve useful purposes when you have questions, need to make decisions or require a helping hand. Your ties to all of them, especially those in the outer reaches of your network, are increasingly mediated through digital technology — from email to Facebook to Skype calls.
    This new social operating system has been emerging for several generations but has accelerated in growth thanks to the recent triple revolution: the widespread adoption of broadband, ubiquitous mobile connectivity and the move from bounded groups—largely closed circles of interlinked contacts - to multiple social networks.
    We have dubbed the result networked individualism because loose-knit networks are overtaking more densely knit groups and traditional hierarchies as the dominant structure of social interaction. In the world of networked individuals, the individual is the focus, not the family, the work unit, the neighbourhood or the social group. Each person creates their own network tailored to their needs, maintaining it through their email address and address book, screen name, social and technological filters, and cellphone number.
    This revolution doesn’t mean physical isolation, as some fear. People still value neighbours, because they remain important for everyday socialising and emergencies. Yet neighbours are only about 10 per cent of our significant ties. While people see co-workers and neighbours often, the most important contacts tend to be with people who live elsewhere in the city, region, nation - and abroad. The new media are able to facilitate such contact, and, in effect, have become the neighbourhood. And it is heavily populated. Data from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project suggests that more than two-thirds of American adults and three-quarters of teenagers have become online content creators through social media and rankings, ratings, commenting and remixing applications. In this world, people can easily locate and connect with others who share their tastes, lifestyles, politics or professional aspirations.
    With such a fundamental social shift linked to still-developing technology, how it unfolds needs to be considered. Evolving social norms will push both ways. Some will encourage openness as people want to connect; others will encourage limits as the hassled and hard-pressed withdraw occasionally. In short, the world will fragment, with some parts moving towards the brighter side of networked individualism and other parts moving towards gated communities and more tightly controlled information flows.
    The triple revolution has given rise to far-reaching consequences, though it is not yet clear what the outermost points of impact will be. What is evident is that networked individualism is tightly tied to technological changes on the horizon and that the time is ripe to contemplate the shape of things to come.
According to Paragraph 5, social norms will grow______.
选项 A、diversified
B、disrupted
C、balanced
D、polarized
答案D
解析 本段指出，演变的社会准则将同时向两个方向推进：一些准则会鼓励开放性，另一些准则会主张限制性。简而言之，世界会分裂成两部分，一部分走向“网络个人主义”的光明面，另一部分则走向封闭社区及严格控制的信息流。由此可见，社会准则会出现两极分化，[D]选项正确。
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