University of Pennsylvania has announced a new degree programme under which students will be able to study ‘wasting time on the internet’.
The course will be run by University’s Department of English with Professor Kenneth Goldsmith as the course lead. Goldsmith is known for his attempt to print off the entire internet.
The course will commence from next year with enrolled students required to attend a weekly three hour seminar. During the session, students will be sat in front of a computer and will be barred from communicating verbally with each other, but instead will be restricted to doing everything via social media, chat rooms.
“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?” reads the course description. Some of the mandatory bits of the course are distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting.
The university will compile the resulting conversations into ‘substantial works of literature’. Further, students will also be required to read texts on the history of time wasting by Betty Friedan, Guy Debord, and famous music theorist John Cage.
“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,” the description adds further.
