Wasting Time on the Internet

June 6, 2016
After describing one of his typical browsing sessions on the Web involving news articles, video clips from a Keith Richards interview, and a 1917 photo posted on Facebook of a full-size battleship being built in New York’s Union Square, Goldsmith (Uncreative Writing), a poet and conceptual artist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, asks: “Am I really wasting time on the Internet? This is important stuff that I’ve stumbled on to.” His question launches this entertaining, vividly written investigation of the ways people interact with the web. Focusing in particular on the “smoldering wreckage of modernism,” Goldsmith works to “extract clues on how to proceed in the digital age” from such disparate subjects as Marcel Duchamp, zombies, the Peanuts character Pig-Pen, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel,” and surrealist poets’ fascination with public sleeping, along with an array of current theorists and artists. “Our devices might be changing us, but to say that they’re dehumanizing us is simply wrong,” he writes. Acute observations of how people actually use technology ground Goldsmith’s far-flung explorations of data archiving, Photoshop, reappropriation, memes, and many other subjects. Though he dwells too long on a few areas and sometimes stretches to bring coherence to his sprawling discussions, Goldsmith maintains a sharp focus as he weaves together wildly diverse ideas, explaining new information clearly for a general audience.

June 15, 2016
A persuasive argument about how what conventional wisdom dismisses as "wasting time" is actually time well spent.A conceptual artist and the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art, Goldsmith (Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century, 2015, etc.) saw his vision go viral when he launched a course with the same name as this book at the University of Pennsylvania. "This class will focus on the alchemical recuperation of aimless surfing into substantial works of literature," he hyperbolized within the course description, which concluded, "distraction, multitasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory." A tweet that linked to that description led to requests for national interviews, and "what ensued was a media feeding frenzy, which ended up consuming itself." He quickly had more than 300 students clamoring to take a course with a capacity of 15. As for the course itself, "From the start, it was a disaster....I had never seen a group of students as demoralized as these. Clearly, my experiment was failing." Well, yes and no, because for a course designed without focus, the students had to discover the process on their own and proceed through uncharted territory. Much like the experience of surfing the web, the book doesn't attempt to provide a cohesive analysis but instead leaps from this intuition to that epiphany and is willing to risk some false starts and even to waste some time along the way. Goldsmith suggests that long before information shifted into digital overdrive, thinkers and artists recognized the crucial role that letting the mind wander plays in creativity. The author finds the surrealists in general and Joseph Cornell in particular to be attuned to the spirit of the internet to come, that "his varied artistic output could be called multimedia some seventy-five years before it become the digital norm." The disconnection that others bemoan from digital technology strikes the author as heightened communication. Goldsmith outlines a future that perhaps offers a hope we can embrace, since a retreat seems impossible.

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July 1, 2016

How guilty should you feel after watching your 20th cat video of the day, or checking your Twitter feed for the 100th time? Not too guilty, states poet and conceptual artist Goldsmith, whose news-making University of Pennsylvania class, "Wasting Time on the Internet" spurred this book's writing. Our ways of interacting with the digital landscape are creating entirely new approaches to expression and collaboration. Furthermore, the author suggests that the online habits we indulge in have antecedents in patterns that have existed for years. He draws connections to the minutiae-laden Diary of Samuel Pepys (1659), James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), and the "assemblage" artwork of Joseph Cornell. Much of the book's value is in its encouragement to examine and reconsider the daily digital life that he says we now take for granted: the design choices of desktop icons, the minute-by-minute details of browser history, and the literal clouds of data stored on smartphones. VERDICT Goldsmith's brushing aside of problems such as Internet addiction and digital hoarding feel a little too casual, but his enthusiastic exploration of how technology is changing and expanding our lives makes for a thought-provoking read.--Kathleen McCallister, Tulane Univ., New Orleans

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