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In aiming for these, people often miss the mark, one reason the platform hosts so much recklessness, attention-seeking and off-target humour. Yet though tweets may be appraised like speech, they are punished like writing. Posts may seem to disappear in an endlessly flowing river, but unless they are deleted they live on indefinitely. A public figure’s stupid tweets are more likely than most to be screen-captured by others, so that even deletion won’t help (and may suggest a guilty conscience). In the days after Ms McCammond’s contrite withdrawal, several of her critics at Teen Vogue made their Twitter accounts private. One turned out to have used a racial epithet to jovially address a (white) friend in 2009.
想要追求這些特質的人們卻往往會偏離正軌，這也是推特充斥著草率、博關注且不著調的幽默段子的原因之一。然而，盡管推文可能被評價為與口語對話類似，但它們卻要像書面語一樣受到譴責。推文看似會淹沒于層出不窮的新推文河流中，但除非被刪除，否則它們將無限期地存在。相較于大多數人，公眾人物欠妥的推文要更容易被其他人截屏，所以即使刪除也無濟于事（還可能昭示博主心里有鬼）。在麥卡蒙德悔恨地刪除推文后的幾天里，她在《美國青少年時尚》工作的幾位批評者將自己的推特賬戶設為私密。其中一人在2009年曾用種族侮辱性稱號打趣一位（白人）朋友。
How will society adjust to this new speech-text hybrid? One theory is that only the most conformist or risk-averse will succeed in a sort of woke dystopia; the rest will be vulnerable to the discovery of an embarrassing tweet in an ever-growing back catalogue. A second possible outcome is safety in numbers. So many people (including path-breaking members of minority groups) will be deemed to have transgressed that skeletons in closets come to be regarded as inevitable. In this scenario, society accepts that more or less everyone has said regrettable things, and that, at least in some cases, tweeting them was merely a dangerous category mistake.
社會將如何適應這種新的口語和書面語的混合形式？一種理論認為，只有最墨守成規或規避風險的人才會在充斥網暴的社交媒體中游刃有余；其他人則會在被翻閱日積月累的過往推文時，被尷尬的推文輕易擊垮。第二個可能的結果是人多保險。如果有太多人的行為被視為越軌（包括少數群體的領先成員），那么人們也會覺得這樣的隱情丑事是不可避免的。在這種情況下，社會可以接受，每個人或多或少都曾說過令人遺憾的話，至少在某些情況下，發推文只是一種危險的范疇錯誤。
Alas, that consensus seems a long way off. Hence the third possibility: that people will learn to keep their risky jokes offline, understanding that even if they feel like colloquial remarks, offensive comments written in black and white can be recalled and judged that way. This would make Twitter a lot duller. Spontaneity is its appeal. But the more careers that are derailed, the more parents will urge children to mind their language online, just as they have long warned them to be careful with strangers.
唉，達成共識似乎還有很長的路要走。因此，第三種可能性是：人們將學會不在網上發表有危險的笑話。他們須得理解即使自己只發了類似口語的文字，但這樣白紙黑字的冒犯性書面語還是會被人想起、遭到評判。這會讓推特變得更沉悶無聊。率性是它的感染力。但越多的職業生涯因推文而斷送，父母就越會敦促孩子注意網絡用語，就像他們長期以來一直提醒孩子要小心陌生人一樣。
Human speech has been around for at least tens of thousands of years, writing for about five millennia. Twitter had its 15th birthday on March 21st. It may be wisest to err on the side of boring until norms settle down.
人類的口頭語至少已經存在了幾萬年，書面語也已經有五千年了。推特在3月21日迎來了它的15歲生日。在規范穩定下來之前，最明智的做法是寧可無聊，也別冒險。
譯文由可可原創，僅供學習交流使用，未經許可請勿轉載。
