How should we tell the story of the digital century, now two decades old? We could focus, as journalists do, on the destruction

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问题     How should we tell the story of the digital century, now two decades old? We could focus, as journalists do, on the destruction of the connected life. As Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have devoured the online world, they have undermined traditional media, empowered propagandists, and widened America’s political divides. The smart phone, for all its wonder and utility, has also proved to be an anaesthetic.
    【T1】The internet age was hailed as a third industrial revolution—a spur for individual ingenuity and an engine of employment, however, on these counts, it has not delivered. To the contrary, the digital age has coincided with a slump in America’s economic dynamism. The tech sector’s innovations have made a handful of people quite rich, 【T2】but it has failed to create enough middle-class jobs or to help solve the country’s most pressing problems: deteriorating infrastructure, climate change, low growth, rising economic inequality.
    Decades from now, historians will likely look back on the beginning of the 21st century as a period when the smartest minds in the world’s richest country sank their talent, time, and capital into a narrow band of human endeavor—digital technology. Their efforts have given us frictionless access to media, information, consumer goods, and chauffeurs. 【T3】Software has hardly remade the physical world when we were promised an industrial revolution, whereas what we got was a revolution in consumer convenience.
    The original Industrial Revolution freed humanity from the centuries-long prison of slow economic growth. In the early 19th century, productivity and income were skyrocketing, first in England and soon throughout Europe. While the transition was brutal for many, 【T4】the gains were broadly shared: Real wages for the working class doubled in the first half of the century, and life expectancy at birth rose dramatically in the second half.
    In the computer age, the economy has trended in the opposite direction. Look up from your textbooks: Everything is getting better except our ability to measure how much better everything is getting. 【T5】But no matter how aggressively you torture the numbers, the computer age has coincided with a decline in the rate of economic growth as well as innovation. The bulk of innovation has been shunted into the invisible realm of bytes and code. All of that code, technology advocates argue, has increased human ingenuity by allowing individuals to tinker, talk, and trade with unprecedented ease. This certainly feels true. But by most measures, individual innovation is in decline.
【T3】

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答案当我们被承诺将发生一场工业革命时,软件却几乎没有重塑物质世界,而我们得到的只是一场消费者便利性的革命。

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