Wasting Time on the Internet: Review

Wasting Time on the Internet: Review

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 11:41 AM IST
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Title: Wasting Time on the Internet

Author: Kenneth Goldsmith

Pages: 247

Price: $14.99

Publisher: HarperCollins

If I could google to find a way

To help me say that I like you

I’d go yahoo make you my boo

Within a day or two

If I messaged, would you read it

Tweet It, would you see it

Cause I can’t say it to your face…

Kenneth Goldsmith – author of several books, conceptual artist and the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art – has immense capacity to shock. In December 2014, during a White House poetry reading session, he chose to ‘entertain’ American President and the First Lady with the reading of traffic reports, in poetic manner. Three months later, in March 2015, at a conference in Brown University, he read a poem titled ‘The Body of Michael Brown’, a slightly altered version of Brown’s official autopsy report, following the teenager’’s death after he was killed by police. A decade earlier, in 2004, Goldsmith had begun teaching “Uncreative Writing,” a course that encouraged students to plagiarise and even went as far as penalizing them if they submitted original thoughts. And today, he teaches a course titled ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ at the University of Pennsylvania, also the title of his latest offering.

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Goldsmith is not averse to courting controversies, but this one is almost a rebellious manifesto – unpalatable even for Internet’s most ardent supporters, at times. Sample this introduction to his course at University of Pennsylvania – we spend our lives in front of the 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 construct our autobiography using only Facebook? Could we write a great novella by plundering our tweeter feed? Could we reframe the Internet as the greatest poem ever written? Using our laptops and a Wi-Fi 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. Distraction, multitasking, and aimless drifting are mandatory.

The jury is still out on whether the course has achieved its mission or proved to be useful for the attendees. But in the book, Goldsmith sounds even more provocative. Consider some of the titles of chapters: ‘Our Browser History is the New Memoir’, ‘Archiving is the New Folk Art’, ‘I Shoot Therefore I Am’ and ‘The Writer as Meme Machine’. He pronounces that Internet is leading to a new creative renaissance of human kind at an unprecedented rate: “The Internet itself is a giant museum, library, and the academy all in one, comprised of everything from wispy status updates to repositories of dense classical texts. And every moment you spend wasting time on the Internet contributes to the pile – even your clicks, favourites, and likes.”

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Goldsmith wants us to relook at the Internet, and not to feel guilty about being online. He sounds almost offended by the argument that Internet is making us dumber and asocial and stresses that it is actually making us more social, creative and even productive. “I think it’s time to drop the simplistic guilt about wasting time on the Internet and instead begin to explore – and perhaps even celebrate – the complex possibilities that lay before us,” he urges. And to convince us, Goldsmith has even appended a list of ‘101 Ways of Waste Time on the Internet’ to the end of his book, informing us that it was authored by his students.

Fine. But anyone who claims that Internet is all hunky dory is wishing away some of the serious problems associated with the online life, far more grave that envisaged by George Orwell in ‘1984’. Serious concerns about privacy, our profiling as a consumer, online frauds – financial, sexual and social – Internet addiction, have not been given the space they deserve in the book.

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Most importantly, there is no mention of humankind’s apocalyptic vulnerability in this digital age. In his latest documentary ‘Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World’, legendary film-maker Werner Herzog interviews several scientists and technologists many of whom sound extremely worried about this aspect. Some of them talk about the possibility of a massive solar flare from sun (it actually happened in 1859). Though nothing of scale has happened since, even smaller solar flares do routinely disrupt communications, satellites and create outages in power grids. “If the information fabric of the world is destroyed (by a solar flare), modern civilization will collapse,” warns Lawrence Krauss, Cosmologist at the University of Arizona. “Hundreds of millions of people will die, billions of people will die. The world will become unimaginably ugly, difficult…” Jonathan Zittrain, Internet Scholar from the Harvard Law School, unveils the dependency of food networks on Internet, currently being routed digitally both in the developed and developing world.  If for some reason these networks are disrupted, then humankind is in a situation wherein “civilization is always about four square meals away from the utter ruin,” cautions Zittrain.

So, by all means go ahead and read Goldsmith’s ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’. But you will be well-advised to keep a DVD of Herzog’s ‘Lo and Behold’ also on hand.

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