单项选择题
While western governments worry over the threat of Ebola, a more pervasive but far less harm- ful ____(1)____ is spreading through their populations like a winter sniffle: mobile personal technology.
The similarity between disease organisms and personal devices is ____(2)____ . Viruses and other para- sites control larger organisms, ____(3)____ resources in order to multiply and spread. Smartphones and other gadgets do the same thing, ____(4)____ ever-increasing amounts of human attention and electricity sup- plied ____(5)____ wire umbilici.
It is tempting to ____(6)____ a “strategy” to both phages and phablets, neither of which is sentient. ____(7)____ , the process is evolutionary, consisting of many random evolutions, ____(8)____ experimented with by many product designers. This makes it all the more powerful.
Tech ____(9)____ occurs through actively-learnt responses, or “operant conditioning” as animal be- haviourists call it. The scientific parallel here also involves a rodent, typically a rat, which occupies a ____(10)____ cage called a Skinner Box. The animal is ____(11)____ with a food pellet for solving puzzles and punished with an electric shock when it fails.
“Are we getting a positive boost of hormones when we ____(12)____ look at our phone, seeking re- wards” asks David Shuker, an animal behaviourist at St Andrews university, sounding a little like a man withholding serious scientific endorsement ____(13)____ an idea that a journalist had in the shower. Re- search is needed, he says. Tech tycoons would meanwhile ____(14)____ that the popularity of mobile devices is attributed to the brilliance of their designs. This is precisely what people whose thought processes have been ____(15)____ by an invasive pseudo-organism would believe.
____(16)____, mobile technology causes symptoms less severe than physiological diseases. There are even benefits to ____(17)____ sufferers for shortened attention spans and the caffeine overload triggered by visits to Starbucks for the free Wi-Fi. Most importantly, you can ____(18)____ the Financial Times in places as remote as Alaska or Sidcup. In this ____(19)____, a mobile device is closer to a symbiotic organism than a parasite. This would make it ____(20)____ to an intestinal bacterium that helps a person to stay alive, rather than a virus that may kill you.