With the proliferation of electronic devices at an all-time high and the internet playing a vital role in the lives of most Americans, one Ivy League professor is zeroing in on the phenomenon with a course entitled “Wasting Time on the Internet.”
The idea by University of Pennsylvania English professor Kenneth Goldsmith is to have students spend as much time as possible chatting with friends, watching YouTube videos, surfing Facebook and other social media, exploring Reddit, etc. Then, the students will take that trove of data and attempt to create “substantial works of literature.”
“Using our laptops and a wifi connection as our only materials, this class will focus on the alchemical recuperation of aimless surfing into substantial works of literature,” a course description reads. “Students will be required to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs. Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory.”
Goldsmith – a poet and professor whose previous projects included printing out the entire scholarly database JSTOR and also attempting to print the whole internet – explains the course’s ultimate goal.
“What if these activities - clicking, SMSing, status-updating, and random surfing - were used as raw material for creating compelling and emotional works of literature? Could we reconstruct our autobiography using only Facebook? Could we write a great novella by plundering our Twitter feed? Could we reframe the internet as the greatest poem ever written?”
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