Wasting Time on the Internet Read Online Free PDF

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? Using our laptops and a Wi-Fi connection as our only materials, this class will focus on the alchemical recuperation of aimless surfing into substantial works of literature. 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.
    A few hours later, when I checked back, the tweet had gone viral, accompanied by comments like: “Wait I believe I already have a PhD in that” and “I’d ace it.” In my feed was a request from Vice for an interview, which I gave a day later. Shortly afterward, I found a message in my inbox from the Washington Post also requesting an interview, which I gave. From then on, I was inundated daily with interview requests, all of which—with the exception of some mainstream television shows—I declined. With a shortage of new chum in the waters from me, what ensued was a media feeding frenzy, which ultimately ended up consuming itself.
    After the two interviews in Vice and the Washington Post , I noticed a spate of second-tier news sites that basically reprinted the Vice and Post pieces in their entirety, slapped on new opening and concluding sentences, gave it a new title, and added a byline. A few days later, a bunch of third-tier sites did the same thing to the text of the second-tier sites. It was a massive game of copy and paste, far from what we consider to be upholding standards of original journalism. It was an object lesson not only on how information travels in a world of cut and paste but also how quickly it can devolve into distorted disinformation.
    With the torrents of press—good and bad—the waiting list for the class had swelled to more than one hundred students for only fifteen seats. After much anticipation, the class finally convened in January 2015 in an oak-paneled Ivy League room. The surroundings—which included a huge oval antique wooden table around which the class gathered—were incongruous with the task at hand. Yet this distinguished room was equipped with racks of audio, video, and Internet equipment, as well as a flat-screen monitor that adorned an otherwise empty wall above the classical wainscoting. An antique chandelier hovered over the table. Because of its location on the university backbone of the Internet, the Wi-Fi in the room was industrial strength. The students filtered into the room, opened their laptops, and—without a word—began wasting time on the Internet. Few instructions were given other than the fact that “something” needed to be written and submitted, culled from these sessions.
    From the start, it was a disaster. The students drifted aimlessly for three hours barely using the social media and LISTSERVs that had been set up for them. With no one to guide or critique them, the writing they produced at the end of each session was dreadful, reflecting the unfocused experience they were having in this class. During cigarette breaks, the students looked isolated, exhausted, and irritated. I wasn’t sure what to do. In my decade of teaching at Penn, I had never seen a group of students as demoralized as these. Clearly, my experiment was failing.
    After one of those breaks, I was sitting at a table outside the room trying to figure out how to solve this mess with my TA when, from out of nowhere, music started blasting from behind the closed doors in the classroom. When we got up to see what was going on, we found all fifteen students,