本期我们的外刊标题是
How Instagram Transformed Our Personal Lives?
《Instagram 如何改变了我们的生活？》
文章节选自NewStatesman
难度：中等
[scode type="blue"]SCANNING[/scode]
①Ten years after its first post, the app exerts an almost inconceivable degree of influence over our culture, psychology and relationships.
②The app made it easy to turn your reality into something aesthetically pleasing and worth offering up for the approval of strangers. Receiving an online "like" delivers a feel-good dopamine hit, and scrolling through other people’s photos can feel intimate and voyeuristic , as though you're outside, peering into row upon row of illuminated living room windows – only everyone's a bit more attractive than average, and the bookshelves are neatly arranged, and no one's baby is screaming.
③The app has helped create a transcultural hipster aesthetic: avocado toast and cappuccino art, fiddle-leaf figs, exposed brick, reclaimed wood, industrial lighting. Instagram has created new real-life hierarchies. It's a celebrity-making machine the likes of which the world has never seen. Over six million Instagram users have a million or more followers. The five Kardashian sisters, once primarily reality TV stars, have a combined reach of over half a billion Instagram followers. Kim Kardashian West is believed to make around $1m for a single Instagram post.
④One Instagram account, which has over 100,000 followers, called @youdidnoteatthat, documents examples of toned, glamorous Instagrammers posing with giant ice-creams or biting into greasy pizza slices that, well, they obviously did not eat. How mind-bending it is that one tried-and-tested way to look good online is to buy good-looking food that you cannot eat, for fear of looking less good online. Or, perhaps, that's only an extreme - version of the kind of calculation we perform all the time as we flit between considering our digital and off-screen lives.
[scode type="blue"]Perusal[/scode]
Receiving an online "like" delivers a feel-good dopamine hit, and scrolling through other people’s photos can feel intimate and voyeuristic, as though you're outside, peering into row upon row of illuminated living room windows
音标：/ˌvwɑ:jə'ristik/
中文释义：
adj. 喜好窥阴的
英英释义：
①Voyeuristic behaviour involves getting sexual pleasure from secretly watching other people having sex or taking their clothes off.
②If you describe someone's behaviour as voyeuristic, you disapprove of them because you think they enjoy watching other people's suffering or problems.
例句：
①There is a voyeuristic thrill in looking at a photograph of someone's front room, complete with personal belongings.
②People like to watch fight videos online; there's always this voyeuristic behaviour with violence.
句意：
收到网上的一些“点赞”，会让人产生一种感觉很棒的多巴胺的刺激，同时当我们不断地在手机上浏览别人的照片时，也会给我们带来一种比较亲密，窥私的感觉，就好像你在外面通过一扇又一扇有着星星点点光的住宅区的玻璃窥探别的隐私一样。
The app has helped create a transcultural hipster aesthetic: avocado toast and cappuccino art, fiddle-leaf figs, exposed brick, reclaimed wood, industrial lighting.
音标：/hɪpstə/
中文释义：
n. 世面灵通的人；赶时髦的人；颓废派成员
adj. 低及臀部的
英英释义：
①If you refer to someone as a hipster, you mean that they are very fashionable, often in a way that you think is rather silly.
②Hipsters are trousers which are designed so that the highest part of them is around your hips, rather than around your waist.
例句：
①Oh, please, don't be a hipster . Be yourself.
哦，拜托，不要做潮人。做你自己。
②You can't be a hipster if you think you're a hipster .
如果你认为自己是潮人，那你就成为不了潮人。
句意：
这款app创造了一种跨文化的潮人美学：鳄梨宴，卡布奇诺咖啡，小提琴叶无花果，裸露的砖块，反复回收的木制品和工业照明设备。
One Instagram account, which has over 100,000 followers, called @youdidnoteatthat, documents examples of toned, glamorous Instagrammers posing with giant ice-creams or biting into greasy pizza slices that, well, they obviously did not eat. How mind-bending it is that one tried-and-tested way to look good online is to buy good-looking food that you cannot eat, for fear of looking less good online.
[font color="#D02090"]toned[/font]
中文释义：
健壮的、强壮的
英英释义：
(of a body) firm and strong
例句：
My legs seem to have toned up with all that walking.
走了那么多路后, 我的腿好像有劲起来。
[font color="#D02090"]mind-bending[/font]
中文释义：
adj. 〈非正〉离奇古怪令人费解的
英英释义：
①If you describe something as mind-bending, you mean that it is difficult to understand or think about.
②Mind-bending means the same as mind-altering.
例句：
Even if it's a little mind- bending and spine-bending, it's spellbinding.
即使它有点令人费解和难以理解，它也是引人入胜的。----《CNN10》
[font color="#D02090"]tried and tested[/font]
中文释义：
(方法,经验等)经过考验,屡试不爽
英英释义：
used many times before and proved to be successful.
例句：
①The risk is not geological. Everyone knows where the oil is. The upgrading and refining facilities required to turn tar to oil cost billions of dollars, but the technology is tried and tested .----《The Economist》
风险并非来自地质探测。每个人都知道石油在哪里虽然将焦油砂转化为石油的升级和精炼设
备成本高达数十亿美元,但这种技术已久经考验,切实可行。
②Follow the tried and trusted methods that have stood the test of time.
遵照这种经过时间考验已被证实可信的方法。
句意：
一个拥有超过10万粉丝的Instagram账户，@youdidnoteatthat，详细记录了一些健美，有魅力的ins网红发的超大的冰激凌和使用油腻的披萨块的照片。好吧，很明显看起来他们并不吃那些食物。在网上很流行的一个屡试不爽的方法就是买一些卖相很好但实际并不能吃的东西发到社交圈，就是为了害怕在网上不能受到追捧，这种想法多么古怪又令人费解呀。
[scode type="share"]外刊原文[/scode]
Ten years after its first post, the app exerts an almost inconceivable degree of influence over our culture, psychology and relationships.
With the right filter, everyone can feel like a professional photographer. With the right framing, for a moment, everyone’s life can look beautiful or like some kind of art. When it first launched in 2010 Instagram only allowed users to filter and share photos, in a uniform 306-pixel square, to like one another's photos, and to follow each other.
The app made it easy to turn your reality into something aesthetically pleasing and worth offering up for the approval of strangers. Receiving an online "like" delivers a feel-good dopamine hit, and scrolling through other people’s photos can feel intimate and voyeuristic, as though you're outside, peering into row upon row of illuminated living room windows – only everyone's a bit more attractive than average, and the bookshelves are neatly arranged, and no one's baby is screaming.
Instagram was one of the first apps to fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation. It has woven itself into our language – the hunt for the "Instagrammable", the consumption of "food porn" – and into how we conduct and document our lives, all those photographed lunches and cliff-edge selfies and holidays saved for, and sought out, because they look good.
The app has helped create a transcultural hipster aesthetic: avocado toast and cappuccino art, fiddle-leaf figs, exposed brick, reclaimed wood, industrial lighting. Instagram has created new real-life hierarchies. It's a celebrity-making machine the likes of which the world has never seen. Over six million Instagram users have a million or more followers. The five Kardashian sisters, once primarily reality TV stars, have a combined reach of over half a billion Instagram followers. Kim Kardashian West is believed to make around $1m for a single Instagram post.
You could, indeed, think of Instagram as a way to honour our quotidian lives. It tells us that everyone's life is worthy of display. It reminds us that the world is worth noticing: urging us to keep an eye out for perfect sunsets and autumn leaves arranged, just so, on grey pavements, and hilariously juxtapositioned street signs. But at the same time, it cheapens and flattens subjective experiences, making users feel as though moments are only valuable if they can be shared online and are met with sufficient approval from strangers.
One Instagram account, which has over 100,000 followers, called @youdidnoteatthat, documents examples of toned, glamorous Instagrammers posing with giant ice-creams or biting into greasy pizza slices that, well, they obviously did not eat. How mind-bending it is that one tried-and-tested way to look good online is to buy good-looking food that you cannot eat, for fear of looking less good online. Or, perhaps, that's only an extreme - version of the kind of calculation we perform all the time as we flit between considering our digital and off-screen lives.
I was reminded of a 2019 New York Magazine cover story, "What Instagram Did to Me". "Somewhere along the line, I think I came to see my shareable self as the authentic one and buried any tendencies that might threaten her likeability so deep down I forgot they even existed," the author writes. "I can try to imagine an alternate universe where I've always roamed free and Instagramless in pastures untouched by the algorithm. But I can't imagine who that person is inside."
A handful of Silicon Valley executives have exerted an almost inconceivable degree of influence over our culture, our identities and our psychology. They have little concern for us – by which, I mean, the average user. And still we dutifully spend great chunks of our limited time on Earth scrolling and clicking and offering up our digital lives to be repackaged and sold, without ever fully understanding how or why we got here.
