Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Improve your English with Movies. English conversation for Master’s students (Совершенствуйте свой английский с помощью фильмов. Разговорный английски
.pdf
Что же происходит с общением лицом к лицу? Почему люди
теперь предпочитают переписываться в интернете, а не болтать
вживую?
Студенты рассказали мне о так называемом правиле трех: не
притрагиваться к телефону во время беседы компании из 5–6 человек, пока как минимум 3 человека включены в диалог. Таким
образом, к беседе подключаются то одни, то другие по очереди,
и у каждого появляется возможность вежливо «нырнуть» в свой
телефон. Можно присутствовать там, где пожелаете, не придется
скучать, и если разговор стал скучным, то вы тут же найдете,
с кем пообщаться онлайн.
Но есть и противоположные примеры, когда молодежь сама
беспокоится по поводу нехватки живого общения. Один 15-летний подросток поделился со мной своей историей: как-то раз
они с отцом что-то обсуждали во время ужина, и мужчина решил
подкрепить свои аргументы фактами, достав при этом телефон.
«Хватит гуглить, папа, я просто хочу поговорить с тобой!»
—
возразил сын отцу.
Мы привыкли всегда быть на связи и научились при необходимости уходить от разговора
—
в частности, от непредсказуемых
бесед, которые делают нас уязвимыми, требуют от нас того, чтобы мы задумывались и генерировали идеи. Именно во время
таких бесед, когда мы чувствуем тон и эмоции собеседника, находим зрительный контакт с ним, мы по-настоящему общаемся.
Конечно же, мы можем постараться больше общаться вживую,
но тренд ясен: сейчас мы ставим телефоны на первое место.
Проблемы с общением начинаются с юности. Вы заметили,
как общается нынешнее подрастающее поколение? Каждый утыкается в свой телефон, и стоит полнейшая тишина. Ко мне не
раз обращались с вопросом приятели, которые работают преподавателями в школах, и они очень обеспокоены этой проблемой:
а что же можно сделать? как научить детей общаться? Это становится пугающей тенденцией.
Психолог Ялда Юлс в 2014 году провела в детском лагере
исследование, касающееся детской зависимости от девайсов. Результаты показали, что уже после 5 дней без телефонов и планшетов ребята смогли лучше распознавать эмоции актеров в видеороликах, чем дети из контрольной группы. Без постоянного
61
отвлечения на гаджеты, благодаря общению и дискуссиям детям
стало куда проще представить себя на чьем-либо месте и описать
эти чувства.
Проблема также в том, что мы не умеем оставаться наедине
с собой и боимся одиночества. Исследование психологов Университета Вирджинии продемонстрировало способность современного поколения к одиночеству следующим образом: людей
попросили посидеть в кресле, остаться наедине со своими мыслями в течение 15 минут без книг и девайсов и при этом не
уснуть. Большинство участников эксперимента предпочли подвергнуть себя мягкому электрошоку, только бы не оставаться
наедине со своими мыслями.
Конечно, нет ничего такого в том, чтобы от скуки залезть
в телефон. Но именно в одиночестве мы учимся концентрироваться, прислушиваться к себе, строить планы. Это необходимо,
мы не должны бояться оставаться наедине с собой.
Наши телефоны
—
уже не просто аксессуары, а психологически сильные устройства, которые меняют нашу жизнь и нас самих. И мы вполне способны оставить свой телефон в другой
комнате на час или два, уделив время близким и друзьям. Да
и на работе порой бывает вполне приятно и полезно поболтать
с коллегами, к тому же командный дух повышает производительность труда.
Одна сотрудница подсказала мне еще одну интересную вещь
под названием «правило 7 минут». Дайте себе 7 минут, чтобы
выслушать собеседника и просто проследить, как разворачивается диалог, прежде чем отвлечься на телефон или что-то подобное.
Однако, как она призналась, очень часто ей не хватает терпения
и рука так и тянется проверить мобильный и обновить какоенибудь приложение.
По мнению психологов Говарда Гарднера и Кэти Дэвис, такое
поведение характерно для «поколения приложений», которое выросло с телефонами в руках. Они нетерпеливы и хотят от мира
мгновенного ответа, как это делают их смартфоны. Но живое
человеческое общение
—
не набор алгоритмов, а уникальное яв-
ление, которое невозможно ничем заменить.
Еще один шаг, который стоит совершить,
—
вернуть живые,
настоящие разговоры с вашими друзьями и окружением, прекра-
62
тить смотреть на мир как на гигантское приложение.
Настало время признать: использование технологий, от которых
мы стали очень уязвимы, может привести к очень серьезным
последствиям. Давайте помнить, что мы уникальные создания
природы, которые обладают невероятно сложной психологией
и достойны настоящих, искренних, раскованных разговоров и дискуссий лицом к лицу.
Статья профессора Шерри Теркл, профессора кафедры социальных исследований науки и техники в Массачусетском технологическом институте.
4. Read the article below and discuss the problem of internet privacy.
Is it at all possible nowadays to protect your anonymity on the net?
#PlaneBae: A cautionary tale about privacy when a story goes viral
By Rozina Sini BBC News
13 July 2018
[https://ok.ru/moyakolomna/topic/150769825980575]
A woman secretly photographed on a fl ight to Dallas has
released a statement about how she has been shamed and harassed since a fi ctional romance about her went viral on social
media.
Parts of a conversation she had with a fellow passenger on 3 July
was overheard by actress and comedian Rosey Blair and her boyfriend, who documented their interpretation of it as an unfolding
romance which became known online as #PlaneBae.
But the woman says she has been hounded and doxxed
—
internet terminology for revealing someone’s personal information without
their consent.
“I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not
a romance
—
it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent,” she said in a statement given to Business
Insider by her lawyer.
The original, and now edited thread was posted to Twitter and
gained more than 250,000 retweets and interactions, and more than
half a million likes.
63
However, amid the thousands of comments from those believing
they were witnessing true love unfold were some who thought it
was intrusive and creepy.
The faces of the two passengers who had unwittingly become the
subject of Rosey’s story had been blurred out, but an online hunt
was under way to try to identify them.
The woman was being referred to as “pretty plane girl” and Twitter users posted screen shots of what they said was her Instagram
account.
“My personal information has been widely distributed online,”
she said in the statement.
“Strangers publicly discussed my private life based on patently
false information. I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real
world.”
In stark contrast, the man in the story told the BBC he had
contacted Rosey himself after being sent the thread by the wife of
a friend.
“Hilarious, knew you were taking pictures,” he posted in a now
deleted tweet.
The story had been a viral hit. It was featured as a Twitter moment, and news organisations covered its popularity on social media.
Embracing the media attention he was receiving, he accepted invitations to appear on US television including Good Morning America, and documented his new found fame on his own Instagram
stories, even changing his social media biography to describe himself
as “Plane Bae”.
However, criticism of the Plane Bae saga was getting louder, as
social media users discussed its privacy and consent implications.
Another post read: “There’s an assumption that everybody wants
to be famous, and thus people who make other people famous are
good people.”
On Tuesday Rosey posted an apology to the woman on Twitter.
“I apologize for taking away something I value myself quite a bit
—
which is sharing one’s own story as means to inspire others,” she
wrote.
“Every woman has a right to her own story, and to have taken
away yours and turned it into my own was wrong on many levels.”
64
The apology it seems is too little too late for the woman involved.
The unwilling participant of the Plane Bae story has broken her
silence and requested that her privacy is respected. Here is her statement in full:
“I am a young professional woman. On July 2, I took a commercial fl ight from New York to Dallas. Without my knowledge or
consent, other passengers photographed me and recorded my conversation with a seatmate.
“They posted images and recordings to social media, and speculated unfairly about my private conduct.
“Since then, my personal information has been widely distributed
online. Strangers publicly discussed my private life based on patently false information. I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and
harassed.
“Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world.
“I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not
a romance
—
it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, iden-
tity, ethics and consent.
“Please continue to respect my privacy, and my desire to remain
anonymous.”
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44820886]
5. Discuss the following topics with your groupmate:
a) The role of Internet Technologies in education;
b) Virtual reality: pros and cons;
c) Social media in our life
d) The role of investigative reporting in the 21
—
a boon or a curse?
st
century.
e) What will our life look like 50 years from now, at the time
of staggering technological developments?
f) The issue of the NET anonymity: is it possible to protect our
online privacy?
6. Write an essay on one of the topics o ered in Ex. 5.
65
UNIT 3: A SOUND MIND
IN A SOUND BODY
VIEWING THE FILM “A STREET CAT NAMED BOB”
I. PREVIEWING ACTIVITIES
1. Read the following article and share your opinion on the tips
how to boost your health.
To Live Longer, Feel Happier and Be Less Stressed, Try Per-
forming Acts of Kindness
By Marta Zaraska, from Growing Young
By giving to others, you will not only live longer, but you
may also end up spending the extra years in a slightly better,
kinder world.
The benefi ts of being nice
Humans like to pretend we are unique in truly caring for others.
In reality, altruism and helping behaviours are far from rare in the
animal kingdom. Just Google “animals saving other animals” and
your screen will be fl ooded with videos of hippos rescuing drowning
baby zebras and baboons chasing off leopards to save antelopes. If
that’s not enough to convince you, rest assured that proper scientifi c studies also fi nd genuine altruism in many animal species, from
capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees to ravens and rooks.
Yet there are some evolutionary reasons why human altruism
should diff er from that of other species. One popular hypothesis
states that caring for others developed from parenting behaviours.
Since human babies are born particularly vulnerable (thank you, big
brains), they require unusually high amounts of care just ask any
new parent who is lacking good sleep. To ensure that mothers and
fathers won’t abandon these needy creatures, nature equipped us with
two systems: one reward-inducing and the other stress-reducing.
66
Snug in the middle of our brain is a grape-sized area known as
the insula, which is activated by such things as helping others, donating money to charity and, yes, caring for kids. Additional rewardrelated brain areas, the septal area and ventral striatum
—
the very
same ones that light up when you fi nd a winning scratch-and-win
card
—
also buzz with activity when you take care of others. In
other words, parenthood and other forms of caregiving are wired to
the brain’s reward system.
Evolution also linked caring with mechanisms that ease stress.
For elderly human volunteers, taking care of infants reduces cortisol
levels in the saliva (which could translate into such health benefi ts
as a reduced risk of high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and
osteoporosis).
The upshot is good news. Whether we’re parents or not, everyday
kindness can ultimately lower our stress, boost our health and help
us live longer.
One way caregiving may inhibit stress is through dampening the
activity of the amygdala, the brain’s centre for emotions, emotional
behaviour and motivation, and disrupting its connections with the
fi ght-or-fl ight response. When adults hear the whimpers of infants,
the response of the amygdala is tempered, allowing them to care for
little ones without burning out.
Down the road, this altruism-related turning down of the stress
response has an impact on our immune systems and infl ammation.
People who frequently volunteer have lower levels of C-reactive
protein
—
a marker of infl ammation. If your blood is teeming with
C-reactive protein, that’s a bad sign, suggesting you may be headed
toward such health problems as cardiovascular disease.
Experiments confi rm that it’s the act of volunteering, not some
other characteristic of people who tend to sign up for unpaid work,
that keeps infl ammation at bay. At one high school in Western Canada, students were divided into two groups. The fi rst group was to
volunteer, helping kids in after-school programs. The second was
wait-listed. When blood samples were compared, a clear image
emerged: people who volunteered had signifi cantly lower levels of
an infl ammatory marker called interleukin 6. Elevated levels of interleukin 6 can mean double the risk of dying within the next fi ve
years.
67
If you don’t have the ability to volunteer in person, monetary
donations, informal caregiving and even simple, everyday acts of
kindness work well for our health, too.
Research by Lara Aknin, an associate professor of psychology at
Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, shows that although
we believe we gain the most happiness from buying stuff for ourselves, in reality we end up better off if we lavish money on others.
Imagine you’ve found $20 on a deserted sidewalk. What would
you do with it? In one experiment, Aknin and her colleagues handed volunteers either a $5 bill or a $20 bill, then instructed half of
the participants to blow the windfall on themselves and the other
half to spend the gift on someone else. Once the money had been
spent and everyone’s moods had been carefully evaluated, Aknin
discovered that those who used the money to please others ended
up signifi cantly happier.
A pleasant mood is not the only benefi t we may derive from
treating others. The gains can be as varied as better sleep, sharper
hearing, stronger muscles and lower blood pressure. When seniors
suff ering from hypertension were handed $40 per week for three
consecutive weeks to either spend on themselves or on someone
else, those who donated saw their blood pressure drop as much as
if they had picked up a healthier lifestyle or started new medication.
You can also boost your health by caring for your family. It may
seem counterintuitive that, say, caring for an aging parent could
make us physically better off , as caregiving often involves poor sleep,
labour and psychological strain. However, several studies have shown
that many caregivers actually live longer. In one such analysis, a study
published in 2013 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, scientists carefully compared over 3,500 family caregivers with more than
3,500 people who didn’t nurse anyone and discovered that the former
had 18 per cent lower mortality rates.
If you are a grandparent, and not too frail, family caregiving can
take the form of babysitting your grandkids. Off ering such help occasionally can lower mortality rates by as much as 37 per cent
—
more
than regular exercise.
In January 2019 I decided to test whether I could boost my health
through everyday acts of kindness, which I’d perform in my hometown
—
a small village in northwestern France. I contacted two sci-
68
entists at King’s College London who study cortisol response—Carmine Pariante, a professor of biological psychiatry, and Naghmeh
Nikkheslat, a post-doctoral researcher
—
and they generously agreed
to help me out. We discussed the details of my experiment, and
soon a package arrived in my mailbox. Inside were printouts to be
fi lled out on each day and a stash of small plastic tubes called
Salivettes. For seven days, I was to collect my saliva in the tubes,
morning, noon and evening, and then ship them back to Pariante
and Nikkheslat, who would measure my cortisol levels. On four of
the saliva-collection days, I’d follow my regular routine. The remaining three would be my “intervention days,” where I’d add small acts
of kindness.
I woke up on day 1 and reached for the Salivette prepared on
my night table. I unscrewed the blue cap and slid a roll-shaped swab
into my mouth. I repeated this three times a day throughout the
week, dutifully noting my moods and everything that happened in
a journal.
On the third day, it was time for my fi rst kindness intervention.
As I sat down at my desk planning fun things I could do for others,
I felt my spirits lifting. The implementation phase was even more
fun. I left a smiley-face sticky note on my neighbours’ car. I bought
and delivered a small box of chocolates for the nice lady at our
local library. At a grocery store, I opened the doors for an elderly
woman. I didn’t know whether my cortisol response was healthier,
but I certainly felt happier.
Over the next two days, I continued with random kindness.
I bought sandwiches for a homeless family. I donated books. I baked
cookies for my husband to share with his colleagues. And I felt
really good.
When the experiment ended, I packaged up the Salivettes and
mailed them back to London. About two weeks later, I received
news from Nikkheslat: they had the results.
While on my regular days I produced on average 64 nmol/L of
cortisol, on my acts of kindness days I produced just a little under
54 nmol/L, suggesting lower levels of stress. Pariante and Nikkheslat
found that on my fi rst day of random kindness, I woke up with
quite elevated cortisol levels, which then dropped signifi cantly by
noon
—
by which time I’d already started my acts of kindness. The
69
next two intervention days, I woke up with considerably lower cortisol levels.
Of course, the health-boosting eff ects don’t mean you can just
skip your hypertension medications. In a perfect scenario, you’d still
eat well, do 30 minutes of physical activity a day, and engage in
kindness. But sometimes it’s easier to skip the gym and instead just
do a few nice things for people.
For my part, I look for more opportunities to perform kind acts
in everyday life. I’m not always as deliberate as I was during my
experiment, but I’m trying. I certainly let more cars pull in ahead
of me when I’m driving.
Unlike other healthy habits, philanthropy is contagious. By giving
to others, you will not only live longer, but you may also end up
spending the extra years in a slightly better, kinder world
readersdigest.ca/health/healthy-living/acts-of-kindness-benefi ts/]
2. Using a dictionary, provide de nitions for the following terms
you have come across in the article:
.
[https://www.
septal area; ventral striatum; insula; osteoporosis; amygdala; cardiovascular disease; immune system; cortisol levels; interleukin; infl ammation; contagious; mortality rate; hypertension, swab.
3. Make up a story where you will use the words and expressions
from the text:
to lavish money on smb; to feel spirits lifting; to derive benefi ts
from; to perform kind acts; to boost one’s health; to see one’s blood
pressure drop; to ease stress; to care for an aging parent; reward
inducing and stress-reducing systems.
4. In pairs discuss the key ideas of the article weighing pros and
cons of the statements below:
a) Caring can ease stress;
b) Altruism-related acts have an impact on our immune system
and infl ammation;
c) We derive health benefi ts when treating others;
70
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]