"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." Simone Weil argued in the mid-twentieth century. Even our virtual playgrounds pay homage to the deeply felt need for place: MySpace was, until recently, called “a place for friends"; Second Life mimics real-life places with its homes, offices, and restaurants. What is different about mobile playgrounds is that mobile devices force real life and virtual life (and real places and virtual places) to try to coexist in a way they never have before.
We want to see this as a good, enabling thing—I can fire off that e-mail to the office and then get back to relaxing on my vacation!—but it is instructive to go to a playground today: even on a weekend, you will see parents engrossed in their iPhones and BlackBerrys while their children make increasingly loud bids for their attention. The November 2, 2009 cover of The New Yorker sadly and beautifully satirized this trend: it shows an illustration of children out trick-or-treating, basked in the glow of houselights, while their parents bask in the glow of the smart-phone in which they are rapt. Even our leisure time, it seems, has been colonized by our need to stay connected and it is a constant struggle to set limits on our engagement with the virtual world so that we can attend to the real one in front of us.
And when we decide to leave home entirely, we find it difficult to leave the demands of work behind. Consider the cruise ship industry: every year, more than three million people board a Carnival Cruise ship to take a vacation. They spend a great deal of time eating and gambling, and then eating some more. The perpetual buffets that have long been a staple of the cruise ship lifestyle cater to one kind of hunger; Carnival now caters to another one that seems counterintuitive in vacationers eager to get away from it all: staying connected. With their twenty-four-hour Internet cafes, onboard WiFi, and an advertising campaign that features bikini-clad patrons lounging on deck chairs with laptop computers, Carnival Cruise Lines has enthusiastically responded to the demands of patrons who seek an ideal of maritime escape but still want to check their e-mail several times a day.
This, too, is the strange new world of leisure: never disconnected, and never really free from the demands of daily life. Notwithstanding all the talk of mobility, we find ourselves tethered in novel ways—not to a hometown, or to a particular social background, but to our devices themselves and the feeling of connection they provide, which we seemingly cannot sit still without.
1.According to the first paragraph, what can we learn about MySpace and Second Life?
2.When saying it is instructive to go to a playground today, the author means that （ ）.
3.The following statements are TRUE except （ ）.
4.The word "tethered" in the last paragraph probably means （ ）.
5.This passage is intended to （ ）.
