Questões de Inglês

T E X T

I Used to Fear Being a Nobody. Then I Left Social Media.

By Bianca Brooks

    What’s happening?”

    I stare blankly at the little box as I try to think of something clever for my first tweet. I settle on what’s at the top of my mind: “My only #fear is being a nobody.” How could I know this exchange would begin a dialogue that would continue nearly every day for the next nine years of my life?

    I began using Twitter in 2010 as a newly minted high school freshman. Though it began as a hub for my quirky adolescent thoughts, over the years it became an archive of my emotional and intellectual voice — a kind of virtual display for the evolution of my politics and artistic identity. But after nine years, it was time to close the archive. My wanting to share my every waking thought became eclipsed by a desire for an increasingly rare commodity — a private life.

    Though I thought disappearing from social media would be as simple as logging off, my refusal to post anything caused a bit of a stir among my small but loyal following. I began to receive emails from strangers asking me where I had gone and when I would return. One message read: “Not to be over familiar, but you have to come back eventually. You’re a writer after all. How will we read your writing?” Another follower inquired, “Where will you go?”

    The truth is I have not gone anywhere. I am, in fact, more present than ever.

    Over time, I have begun to sense these messages reveal more than a lack of respect for privacy. I realize that to many millennials, a life without a social media presence is not simply a private life; it is no life at all: We possess a widespread, genuine fear of obscurity.

    When I consider the near-decade I have spent on social media, this worry makes sense. As with many in my generation, Twitter was my entry into conversations happening on a global scale; long before my byline graced any publication, tweeting was how I felt a part of the world. Twitter functions much like an echo chamber dependent on likes and retweets, and gaining notoriety is as easy as finding someone to agree with you. For years I poured my opinions, musings and outrage onto my timeline, believing I held an indispensable place in a vital sociopolitical experiment.

    But these passionate, public observations were born of more than just a desire to speak my mind — I was measuring my individual worth in constant visibility. Implicit in my follower’s question “Where will you go?” is the resounding question “How will we know where you’ve gone?” Privacy is considered a small exchange for the security of being well known and well liked.

    After all, a private life boasts no location markers or story updates. The idea that the happenings of our lives would be constrained to our immediate families, friends and real-life communities is akin to social death in a world measured by followers, views, likes and shares.

    I grow weary when I think of this as the new normal for what is considered to be a fruitful personal life. Social media is no longer a mere public extension of our private socialization; it has become a replacement for it. What happens to our humanity when we relegate our real lives to props for the performance of our virtual ones?

    For one, a predominantly online existence can lull us into a dubious sense of having enacted concrete change, simply because of a tweet or Instagram post. As “hashtag activism” has obscured longstanding traditions of assembly and protest, there’s concern that a failure to transition from the keyboard to in-person organization will effectively stall or kill the momentum of political movements. (See: Occupy Wall Street.) 

    The sanctity of our most intimate experiences is also diminished. My grandfather Charles Shaw — a notable musician whose wisdoms and jazz scene tales I often shared on Twitter — passed away last year. Rather than take adequate time to privately mourn the loss of his giant influence in my life alongside those who loved him most, I quickly posted a lengthy tribute to him to my followers. At the time I thought, “How will they remember him if I don’t acknowledge his passing?”

    Perhaps at the root of this anxiety over being forgotten is an urgent question of how one ought to form a legacy; with the rise of automation, a widening wealth gap and an unstable political climate, it is easy to feel unimportant. It is almost as if the world is too big and we are much too small to excel in it in any meaningful way. We feel we need as many people as possible to witness our lives, so as not to be left out of a story that is being written too fast by people much more significant than ourselves.

    “The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow,” the writer Anais Nin said. “This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.”

    I think of those words and at once any fear of obscurity is eclipsed by much deeper ones — the fear of forgoing the sacred moments of life, of never learning to be completely alone, of not bearing witness to the incredible lives of those who surround me.

    I observe the world around me. It is big and moving fast. “What’s happening?” I think to myself.

    I’m just beginning to find out.

From:www.nytimes.com/Oct. 1, 2019

T E X T

I Used to Fear Being a Nobody. Then I Left Social Media.

By Bianca Brooks

    What’s happening?”

    I stare blankly at the little box as I try to think of something clever for my first tweet. I settle on what’s at the top of my mind: “My only #fear is being a nobody.” How could I know this exchange would begin a dialogue that would continue nearly every day for the next nine years of my life?

    I began using Twitter in 2010 as a newly minted high school freshman. Though it began as a hub for my quirky adolescent thoughts, over the years it became an archive of my emotional and intellectual voice — a kind of virtual display for the evolution of my politics and artistic identity. But after nine years, it was time to close the archive. My wanting to share my every waking thought became eclipsed by a desire for an increasingly rare commodity — a private life.

    Though I thought disappearing from social media would be as simple as logging off, my refusal to post anything caused a bit of a stir among my small but loyal following. I began to receive emails from strangers asking me where I had gone and when I would return. One message read: “Not to be over familiar, but you have to come back eventually. You’re a writer after all. How will we read your writing?” Another follower inquired, “Where will you go?”

    The truth is I have not gone anywhere. I am, in fact, more present than ever.

    Over time, I have begun to sense these messages reveal more than a lack of respect for privacy. I realize that to many millennials, a life without a social media presence is not simply a private life; it is no life at all: We possess a widespread, genuine fear of obscurity.

    When I consider the near-decade I have spent on social media, this worry makes sense. As with many in my generation, Twitter was my entry into conversations happening on a global scale; long before my byline graced any publication, tweeting was how I felt a part of the world. Twitter functions much like an echo chamber dependent on likes and retweets, and gaining notoriety is as easy as finding someone to agree with you. For years I poured my opinions, musings and outrage onto my timeline, believing I held an indispensable place in a vital sociopolitical experiment.

    But these passionate, public observations were born of more than just a desire to speak my mind — I was measuring my individual worth in constant visibility. Implicit in my follower’s question “Where will you go?” is the resounding question “How will we know where you’ve gone?” Privacy is considered a small exchange for the security of being well known and well liked.

    After all, a private life boasts no location markers or story updates. The idea that the happenings of our lives would be constrained to our immediate families, friends and real-life communities is akin to social death in a world measured by followers, views, likes and shares.

    I grow weary when I think of this as the new normal for what is considered to be a fruitful personal life. Social media is no longer a mere public extension of our private socialization; it has become a replacement for it. What happens to our humanity when we relegate our real lives to props for the performance of our virtual ones?

    For one, a predominantly online existence can lull us into a dubious sense of having enacted concrete change, simply because of a tweet or Instagram post. As “hashtag activism” has obscured longstanding traditions of assembly and protest, there’s concern that a failure to transition from the keyboard to in-person organization will effectively stall or kill the momentum of political movements. (See: Occupy Wall Street.) 

    The sanctity of our most intimate experiences is also diminished. My grandfather Charles Shaw — a notable musician whose wisdoms and jazz scene tales I often shared on Twitter — passed away last year. Rather than take adequate time to privately mourn the loss of his giant influence in my life alongside those who loved him most, I quickly posted a lengthy tribute to him to my followers. At the time I thought, “How will they remember him if I don’t acknowledge his passing?”

    Perhaps at the root of this anxiety over being forgotten is an urgent question of how one ought to form a legacy; with the rise of automation, a widening wealth gap and an unstable political climate, it is easy to feel unimportant. It is almost as if the world is too big and we are much too small to excel in it in any meaningful way. We feel we need as many people as possible to witness our lives, so as not to be left out of a story that is being written too fast by people much more significant than ourselves.

    “The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow,” the writer Anais Nin said. “This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.”

    I think of those words and at once any fear of obscurity is eclipsed by much deeper ones — the fear of forgoing the sacred moments of life, of never learning to be completely alone, of not bearing witness to the incredible lives of those who surround me.

    I observe the world around me. It is big and moving fast. “What’s happening?” I think to myself.

    I’m just beginning to find out.

From:www.nytimes.com/Oct. 1, 2019

TEXTO:

Don’t Do This

    Given the case of a 43-year-old French
psychiatrist who suffered a minor stroke after spending
more than an hour talking with a telephone between
his head and shoulders, doctors are now warning
[5] us not to cradle the phone between our heads and
shoulders. The stroke caused the man to experience
difficulty speaking and a temporary blindness in his
left eye along with ringing in his left ear. Neurologist
Mathieu Zuber warns, “It shows us how everyday
[10] activities can have unpredictable consequences for
some.”

Speak up, ano XIV, n. 170, p. 36.

“stroke” (l. 2) - derrame cerebral.
“cradle” (l. 5) - to hold.

TEXTO

“Words like these have lost their meaning to many refugees:
home, family, work, human rights, future. Its our job to give them meaning again.” UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).

A questão referem-se ao texto destacado:

About seven years ago, three researchers at the University of Toronto built a system that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to recognize everyday objects, like dogs, cars and flowers. The system was so effective that Google bought the tiny start-up these researchers were only just getting off the ground. And soon, their system sparked a technological revolution. Suddenly, machines could “see” in a way that was not possible in the past.

This made it easier for a smartphone app to search your personal photos and find the images you were looking for. It accelerated the progress of driverless cars and other robotics. And it improved the accuracy of facial recognition services, for social networks like Facebook and for the country’s law enforcement agencies. But soon, researchers noticed that these facial recognition services were less accurate when used with women and people of color. Activists raised concerns over how companies were collecting the huge amounts of data needed to train these kinds of systems. Others worried these systems would eventually lead to mass surveillance or autonomous weapons.

Fonte: Matz, Cade. Seeking Ground Rules for A. I. www.nytimes.com, 01/03/2019. Adaptado. Acessado em Agosto/2019.)

A questão referem-se ao texto destacado:

“Of course they’re fake videos, everyone can see they're not real. All the same, they really did say those things, didn't they?” These are the words of Vivienne Rook, the fictional politician played by Emma Thompson in the brilliant dystopian BBC TV drama Years and Years. The episode in question, set in 2027, tackles the subject of “deepfakes” – videos in which a living person's face and voice are digitally manipulated to say anything the programmer wants.

Rook perfectly sums up the problem with these videos – even if you know they are fake, they leave a lingering impression. And her words are all the more compelling because deepfakes are real and among us already. Last year, several deepfake porn videos emerged online, appearing to show celebrities such as Emma Watson, Gal Gadot and Taylor Swift in explicit situations.

[…]

In some cases, the deepfakes are almost indistinguishable from the real thing – which is particularly worrying for politicians and other people in the public eye. Videos that may initially have been created for laughs could easily be misinterpreted by viewers. Earlier this year, for example, a digitally altered video appeared to show Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, slurring drunkenly through a speech. The video was widely shared on Facebook and YouTube, before being tweeted by President Donald Trump with the caption: “PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE”. The video was debunked, but not before it had been viewed millions of times. Trump has still not deleted the tweet, which has been retweeted over 30,000 times.

The current approach of social media companies is to filter out and reduce the distribution of deepfake videos, rather than outright removing them – unless they are pornographic. This can result in victims suffering severe reputational damage, not to mention ongoing humiliation and ridicule from viewers. “Deepfakes are one of the most alarming trends I have witnessed as a Congresswoman to date,” said US Congresswoman Yvette Clarke in a recent article for Quartz. “If the American public can be made to believe and trust altered videos of presidential candidates, our democracy is in grave danger. We need to work together to stop deepfakes from becoming the defining feature of the 2020 elections.”

Of course, it’s not just democracy that is at risk, but also the economy, the legal system and even individuals themselves. Clarke warns that, if deepfake technology continues to evolve without a check, video evidence could lose its credibility during trials. It is not hard to imagine it being used by disgruntled ex-lovers, employees and random people on the internet to exact revenge and ruin people’s reputations. The software for creating these videos is already widely available.

Fonte: Curtis, Sophie. https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/deepfake-videos-creepy-new-internet-18289900. Adaptado. Acessado em Agosto/2019.