In the spring of 2015, Kenneth Goldsmith taught a course at University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet,” which later occasioned his book of the same title. In a rare turn for an English class, the course went viral, attracting national media attention and sparking debate over the validity of such academic inquiry. The course description explained what the course would entail:
Students will be required to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media, and LISTSERVs. To bolster our practice, we’ll explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time wasting through critical texts. Distraction, multitasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory.
Goldsmith (29-30)
By his own account, the course got off to a rough start. But one student broke the collective malaise of an entire staring at individual screens by asking everyone to play a music video at the same time. The rest of the semester they devised new ways to waste time together, as a group. Their efforts comprise the appendix to Wasting Time on the Internet, “101 Ways to Waste Time on the Internet.”
For this project, you will reproduce their experiment by picking at least one of those ways to waste time, trying it out, and reporting on your experience.
Your first task will be to form a group of three people. (If you cannot make a three-person group, you need permission to make a four-or-five-person group.) Schedule time outside of class to meet. Be sure to give yourselves enough time to accomplish all that you have planned. You might want to agree on which experiments you’ll reproduce in advance, so that you can plan accordingly.
The next step will be to waste time on the Internet. Feel free to adjust the experiment as necessary. Run with your ideas. Improvise. Play around. Make your own rules. The idea is to see how collective, structured experience of wasting time online differs from what you might consider more habitual, everyday practices of wasting time online.
Finally, reflect on your experiment by writing up an individual report. The report should be both descriptive and reflective. Start by explaining which of the experiments you recreated, how you went about doing it, what it was like, and so forth. Then explain what you thought of the experience. Was it a waste of time? Or did you get something out of it? Did you have fun? Learns something? Feel something different or gain a new perspective? Would you consider it an art experience? The report should be 300-500 words long and needs to incorporate discussion of the chapters we’ve read from Goldsmith’s book so far (“Let’s Get Lost” and “The Walking Dead”). Include at least one quote.
The report is due to Moodle before class on Thursday, October 10th.
Literature & the Internet 