- Every click is indicative of who we are: indicative of our likes, our dislikes, our emotions, our politics, our world view. Of course, marketers have long recognized this, but literature hasn’t yet learned to treasure—and exploit—this situation. The idea for this class arose from my frustration with reading endless indictments of the Web for making us dumber. I’ve been feeling just the opposite. We’re reading and writing more than we have in a generation, but we are reading and writing differently—skimming, parsing, grazing, bookmarking, forwarding, retweeting, reblogging, and spamming language—in ways that aren’t yet recognized as literary.
This class would super irritate me, mainly because I feel I already put in about 20 hours a week doing this exact thing. I would find it far more interesting if this article discusses what (if anything) these students will be expected to produce - a live stream of their clicks can't be it, surely? Because otherwise this class irritates me because of what an easy A it would be, at the school i would love to get into for grad school if only it wasn't for their university-wide mandate that all graduate students have a 3.5 undergrad gpa. I mean, come on, let me in - I'm already excelling at the coursework, apparently.
Here is a good list of sites for these students to "waste their time on" while inducing their hazed state. I'm, of course, partial to #14.Come January, fifteen University of Pennsylvania creative-writing students and I will sit silently in a room with nothing more than our devices and a Wi-Fi connection, for three hours a week, in a course called “Wasting Time on the Internet.” Although we’ll all be in the same room, our communication will happen exclusively through chat rooms and listservs, or over social media. Distraction and split attention will be mandatory. So will aimless drifting and intuitive surfing. The students will be encouraged to get lost on the Web, disappearing for three hours in a Situationist-inspired dérive, drowsily emerging from the digital haze only when class is over. We will enter a collective dreamspace, an experience out of which the students will be expected to render works of literature. To bolster their practice, they’ll explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time-wasting, through critical texts by thinkers such as Guy Debord, Mary Kelly, Erving Goffman, Raymond Williams, and John Cage.