Wasting Time on the Internet Read Online Free PDF Page B

up out of their chairs, dancing madly to Khia’s X-rated rap song “My Neck, My Back,” which was blaring from all fifteen laptops streaming the identical YouTube video. One student commandeered the huge screen on the wall by jacking his computer into it, playing the video on the monitor, and pumping the sound through the room’s speakers. The room resembled a cross between a television showroom—where all the TVs are lined up in a row playing the same show—and a disco. I wasn’t sure what happened, but something had changed.
    As it turns out, one of the students sent a request to the LISTSERV in silence, asking everyone to participate in a writing exercise she needed help with. Her idea was for everyone in the room to pick a song and play it aloud. She would then listen to the cacophony of lyrics and write down snippets from random lyrics she heard, coming up with an audio portrait in words. The students obliged, but the cacophony of fifteen computers each playing a different song proved to be too overwhelming for her to extract anything worthwhile. Instead, breaking the rules, the class began a lively discussion, brainstorming on how they could help make her project better. They decided to see what would happen if they all played the same song at the same time, which was, in short, how they stopped writing and starteddancing. As soon as that song ended, they began debating the next song to play. The video was queued, and on the count of three, everyone pushed Start. The next song began, and the dancing resumed. For the next two hours, until the class ended, all they did was dance.
    The next week in class, fully energized and working as a group, they began to throw around other ideas for wasting time on the Internet that they could do together. Gone was the lethargy; gone was the silence. In their place, dozens of ideas flew around the room, which were debated and tested. Some were great; many failed.
    One particularly provocative idea was for everybody to open their laptops and pass them to the person seated to their left. For the next minute, that person could open anything on the laptop—any document, folder, or file. The only rules were that nothing could be altered or deleted and, for transparency’s sake, no windows that had been opened could be closed. At the end of a minute, the laptops would be passed again to the person sitting to the left of them, and so forth, until every machine had traveled around the table and fifteen different people had a turn with everybody’s computer. Upon hearing this proposition, my students’ faces went white. I could feel the fear rippling through the room. There was hesitation. Some expressed reservations: “My whole life is on that laptop!” or “I’ve never allowed anyone to touch my laptop before.” But once they realized that everyone was in the same position of radical vulnerability, they agreed to cautiously proceed.
    What transpired was both fascinating and a bit anticlimactic. I saw one woman hesitantly eyeing someone’s laptop, which had landed in front of her. She pecked at a few keys, opened a couple of windows, and passed it on. I watched another student as he dug a few levels deep into a directory, found a Word document, opened it, glanced quickly at it, and proceeded to dig around some more. Finally, when your laptop made its way back to you, you saw exactly what everyone had looked at. My laptop returned with my iPhoto open, several of my downloaded videos playing, and a bunch of financial spreadsheets cracked. Someone had gone through my e-mails; someone searched for the word “porn”; someone else took a peek at my book in progress. Upon inspecting their computers, they had a variety of responses, mostly of amusement. As it turns out, even if, for example, somebody’s diaries were found, there hadn’t been enough time to uncover the juicy parts. After all, there wasn’t much to