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One of the best things about college was getting to pick your own schedule, designing your week so that you had mornings to sleep in if you wanted, nights free if you didn’t, and the ability to carve out time just for chilling out and playing on the Internet.
But one Ivy League school is making it so that play time will actually count for class credit.
The University of Pennsylvania will offer a class titled, “Wasting Time on the Internet,” next semester.
“I’m very tired of reading articles in the New York Times every week that make us feel bad about spending so much time on the internet, about dividing our attention so many times,” Kenneth Goldsmith, the course’s professor, told 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 in the digital age.”
The course is the brainchild of Goldsmith, the man who wanted to get the world to “print out the internet” because everything on it is worth saving and archiving.
In class, students will be instructed to distract themselves and drift aimlessly.
“I want their attention across tablets, phones, screens, music,” Goldsmith told Motherboard. “I want it divided many, many times.”
He believes that people are reading and writing more than ever, but that there is a negative “stigma” attached to the online writing on Gchat, Reddit and Facebook.
“We’re writing an enormous amount, but somehow the culture keeps devaluing that. I think, yes, this is real writing,” he said. “If we can claim that writing as poetry, [then] that alienation and guilt can be expunged and the writing can be celebrated. We can look forward to wasting time on the internet instead of deriding it.”
The course is sure to be popular with students, but with UPenn’s more than $47,000 a year tuition rate, it is unclear whether their parents will be as enamored with a course in “wasting time.”
