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compression in order to participate in the global cornucopia of file sharing and social media. And what of consumption? I’ve outsourced much of it. While I might only be able to read a fraction of what I’ve downloaded, web spiders—indexing automatons—have read it all. While part of me laments this, another part is thrilled at the rare opportunity to live in one’s own time, able to reimagine the status of the cultural object in the twenty-first century where context is the new content.
    The web ecology runs on quantity. Quantity is whatdrove the vast data leaks of Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, leaks so absurdly large they could never be read in their entirety, only parsed, leaks so frighteningly huge they were derided by the mainstream media as “information vandalism,” a critique that mistook the leak’s form for function—or malfunction—as if to say the gesture of liberating information is as important as what’s actually being moved. To Assange, Swartz, Manning, and Snowden, what was being moved was important—a matter of life and death. But then again to many of us, our devices are a matter of life and death. The ubiquity of smartphones and dashboard and body cams, combined with the ability to distribute these images virally, have shed light on injustices that previously went unnoticed. When critics insist we put down our devices because they are making us less connected to one another, I have to wonder how the families of Tamir Rice or Laquan McDonald might react to that.
    This book attempts to reconcile these contradictions and embrace these multiplicities as a means of reenriching, reenlivening, recuperating, and reclaiming the time we spend in front of screens—time that is almost always dismissed as being wasted. Scrawled across the walls of Paris in May 1968, the slogan “live without dead time” became a rallying cry for a way of reclaiming spaces and bureaucracies that suck the life from you. I’d like to think our web experience can be nearly bereft of dead time if only we had the lens through which to see it that way. I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture. The downsides of the web are well known: trolling,hate, flame wars, spam, and rampant stupidity. Still, there’s something perverse about how well we use the web yet how poorly we theorize our time spent on it. I’m hearing a lot of complaints, but I’m not getting too many answers, which makes me think perhaps our one-dimensional approach has been wrongheaded. Befitting a complex medium, one that is resistant to singularities, let’s consider a panoply of ideas, methods, and inspirations. The word “rhizomatic” has been used to describe the web to the point of cliché, but I still find it useful. The rhizome, a root form that grows unpredictably in all directions, offers many paths rather than one. The genie will not be put back in the bottle. Walking away is not an option. We are not unplugging anytime soon. Digital detoxes last as long as grapefruit diets do; transitional objects are just that. I’m convinced that learning, interaction, conversation, and engagement continues as it always has, but it’s taking new and different forms. I think it’s time to drop the simplistic guilt about wasting time on the Internet and instead begin to explore—and perhaps even celebrate—the complex possibilities that lay before us.

CHAPTER 1
The Social Network
    One crisp Saturday morning in the fall of 2014, I announced a new course on my modest Twitter feed: “My class, called Wasting Time on the Internet, will be offered @Penn next semester,” along with a link to the course description:
    Â Â Â Â  We spend our lives in front of screens, mostly wasting time: checking social media, watching cat videos, chatting, and shopping. What if these activities—clicking, SMSing, status updating, and