In addition to its virtues as a price discovery mechanism, a dirty picture distribution system and a way for the government to spy on its citizens, the Internet has destroyed the notion that people don’t like to read. Sure there are cat pics and endless videos (including the one attached above) but the sheer volume of the amount of written and read material on the Internet is greater by far than the content of the Library of Congress through, say, 1989.
Anyone who has stumbled into a net rabbit hole well knows, it’s beyond easy to lose hours, if not days, daisy-chaining loosely related material together until you have a mastery of whatever arcane topic you choose. A search for the origins of the term “Rabbit Hole” for instance starts with Lewis Carrol from which you can quickly leap to drugs, pedophilia, Tom Petty videos or any manner of topics previously un-mulled.
The fact that much, if not most, of what you read is inaccurate or disturbing is hardly the point. The real takeaway of any Internet thought experiment is that your ability to take in and retain all manner of information in a short burst of inspiration is much greater than you think. That being the case, the wonder isn’t that an Ivy League professor is teaching a course on how to best waste time on the Internet but rather that it’s not already a major option.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Ken Goldsmith says his course, fitting called Wasting Time on the Internet fills an important educational void.
Kids "are doing it anyway and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle," Goldsmith says. "Part of my job here is to make students self-conscious and aware of the different choices they're making and then to be accountable for those choices."
According to the course prospectus Wasting Time on the Internet explores the recuperative powers of boredom and time wasting. That will manifest itself, Goldsmith says, in students taking that time they "wasted" and turning it into works of art, literature or poetry.
The idea of turning someone else's work into a new art form is familiar ground to Goldsmith. For the past ten years he has taught a class at UPenn called "uncreative writing" in which students "must plagiarize, they must steal, they must misrepresent. When you have those constraints on you, you can come up with some pretty remarkable works that you never dreamed you could." This new course aims to do something similar with a shared digital experience.
It does, of course, beg the question: is this really wasting time if students are being directed and ultimately rewarded for their work, but Goldsmith seemed more interested in what is born of this class than the truth of the title.