《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第122期:FACEBOOK之死亡國(3)
Right now, next of kin can convert a dead person's Facebook profile into a memorial page. But there are a lot of questions surrounding passwords and access to private data that we haven't yet developed social norms for. Should accounts remain accessible? What should be made private? Should next of kin have the right to access email? Should memorial pages have comments? How do we handle trolling and vandalism? Should people be allowed to interact with dead user accounts? What lists of friends should they show up on?
These are issues that we're currently in the process of sorting out by trial and error. Death has always been a big, difficult, and emotionally charged subject, and every society finds different ways to handle it.
這些問題，我們目前正在靠試錯法尋找解決方案。死亡一直以來都是一個重大的、艱難的、情緒化的話題，不同的社會有不同的處理方法。The basic pieces that make up a human life don't change. We've always eaten, learned, grown, fallen in love, fought, and died. In every place, culture, and technological landscape, we develop a different set of behaviors around these same activites.
但組成一個人的一生的基本事件是不會變的。我們都要吃飯、學習、長大、戀愛、鬥爭，最終死去。在不同的地理位置、文化環境以及技術圖景中，我們圍繞着這些基本活動發展出不同的行爲。
Like every group that came before us, we're learning how to play those same games on our particular playing field. We're developing, through sometimes messy trial and error, a new set of social norms for dating, arguing, learning, and growing on the Internet. Sooner or later, we'll figure out how to mourn.
正如在我們之前活過的每一個人一樣，我們都是在自己的人生運動場上進行着相同的遊戲。雖然事情有時總不盡如人意，有時還會碰一鼻子灰，但我們還是不斷地在互聯網上更新着戀愛、爭吵、學習以及長大的社交準則。我們遲早會明白該如何去祭奠。1 At the time I wrote this, anyway, which was before the bloody robot revolution.
1． 至少在我寫這篇文章的時候還是這樣的，機器人的血腥革命還沒開始呢。2 You can get user counts for each age group from Facebook's create-an-ad tool, although you may want to try to account for the fact that Facebook's age limits cause some people to lie about their ages.
2． 你可以用Facebook的create-an-ad工具來數一下不同年齡段的用戶數，不過你也得承認Facebook對用戶年齡的限制使得一些用戶不得不在年齡上撒謊。3 Note: In some of these projections, I used US age/usage data extrapolated to the Facebook userbase as a whole, because it's easier to find US census and actuarial numbers than to assemble the country-by-country for the whole Facebook-using world. The US isn't a perfect model of the world, but the basic dynamics - young people's Facebook adoption determines the site's success or failure while population growth continues for a while and then levels off - will probably hold approximately true. If we assume a rapid Facebook saturation in the developing world, which currently has a faster-growing and younger population, it shifts many of the landmarks by a handful of years, but doesn't change the overall picture as much as you might expect.
3． 一些地方我用的是美國地區的數據來代表整體的數據，因爲美國地區的數據比較好找，我也不想一個一個去找那些用Facebook國家的具體數字。美國數據並不能很好地代表全世界，但基本道理——人口數量會在繼續上漲一段時間後持平，年輕人對Facebook的接納程度決定了這個網站的成功與否——不管在什麼地方大致都是一樣的。發展中國家人口增長更快，平均年齡也更低，如果假設那裏使用Facebook的人口迅速飽和，這會讓一些里程碑式事件提前好幾年，不過整體來說，變化並沒有你想象中的大。4 I'm assuming, in these cases, that no data is ever deleted. So far, that's been a reasonable assumption; if you've made a Facebook profile, that data probably still exists, and most people who stop using a service don't bother to delete their profiles. If that behavior changes, or if Facebook performs a mass purging of its archives, the balance could change rapidly and unpredictably.
4． 我假定的是Facebook不會刪除用戶信息，因爲即使一些用戶不用Facebook了，他們也很少會去刪除個人數據。但一旦這一假設不成立，結論就會有很大的變化。5 Of course, if there's a sudden rapid increase in the death rate of Facebook users - possibly one that includes humans in general - the crossover could happen tomorrow.
5． 也許Facebook用戶——很有可能是全人類——的死亡率會在突然之間急速上升，轉折點發生在明天也不是沒有可能。6 I hope.
6． 但願如此。
