The College Fix

One of Kenneth Goldsmith’s classes at the University of Pennsylvania this coming spring will be ENGL 111.301 — “Wasting time on the Internet.”

Here’s part of the course description:

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.

It goes to say “To bolster our practice, we’ll explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time-wasting through critical texts about affect theory,” and notes numerous thinkers such as Guy Debord, Mary Kelly Erving Goffman, and Betty Friedan.

Prof. Goldsmith tells Motherboard “I think it’s complete bullshit that the internet is making us dumber. I think the internet is making us smarter. There’s this new morality built around guilt and shame is the digital age.”

Read the full article.

h/t to Joanne Jacobs.

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