Most teachers and professors frown upon students who browse the internet instead of paying attention during class. A new course at the University of Pennsylvania will encourage students to search, browse, read and watch as much material as they can on the internet during the three-hour class period.
American poet Kenneth Goldsmith will teach the course called "Wasting Time on the Internet" that requires students to search the internet and only communicate through "chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs," according to the Ivy League course description. The class will meet once a week during the spring semester and will also include reading the works of such thinkers like Guy Debord, Mary Kelly Erving Goffman, Betty Friedan and others.
Goldsmith's objective will be to get the class "to write something good at the end of the course, as a result of all that forced distraction," according to The Washington Post.
"We do it, but we're not really thinking about what we're doing," Goldsmith told the Post about mindlessly surfing the web. "I'm so tired of reading, every time you pick up a paper, on how bad the Web is."
The poet disagrees with this notion. He thinks the "Internet is making us smarter."
In a sort of reverse psychology, Goldsmith hopes that by forcing his students to waste time on the internet in his course, they will stop committing the bad classroom etiquette in other courses. He has received no "substantial negative criticism" about the course at the Ivy League institution, according to the Post.
"Creative writing and art is the place where you get to try out... things that might seem a little bit outrageous," Goldsmith said. "Isn't that what an undergraduate education is, really? It sounds like a perfect undergraduate class to me."
Here is the full course description for "Wasting Time on the Internet":
Live without dead time. - Situationist graffiti, Paris, May 1968 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 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 wifi 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 about affect theory, ASMR, situationism and everyday life by thinkers such as Guy Debord, Mary Kelly Erving Goffman, Betty Friedan, Raymond Williams, John Cage, Georges Perec, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefevbre, Trin Minh-ha, Stuart Hall, Sianne Ngai, Siegfried Kracauer and others. Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory.
