The College Fix

University of Pennsylvania’s ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ course lived up to its name

This past spring, the University of Pennsylvania offered an English class called “Wasting Time on the Internet,” which included, among other assignments, watching porn during class.

Other experiences ranged from “spreading rumors across the internet to simply filming [themselves]… for the entire 3-hour class,” according to a freshman who took the seminar.

As for the porn assignment, the student, who asked to remain anonymous, said in an email to The College Fix that the class sat in a circle in a crowded university building “and played the same porn video on our computers at the same time on full volume.”

“It created a very uncomfortable environment for us – some of the class even got up part of the way through and left because they were uncomfortable,” she stated, adding other students on campus apparently did not notice the group porn viewing.

“People … didn’t even hear or notice, to my knowledge,” she said.

She described the pornography screening as part of a series of “experiments based on discomfort – trying to make the most uncomfortable environment possible.”

Lecturer Kenneth Goldsmith did not respond to emailed requests by The College Fix seeking comment.

According to Slate, Goldsmith encouraged students to “attend to the stuplime,” which he defined as “when the stupid flips over into the sublime and you can’t pull the two apart. Something is so stupidly sublime or sublimely stupid that it becomes transcendent.”

He expanded on this idea in The New Yorker:

“Nothing is off limits: if it is on the Internet, it is fair play. Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir.”

Goldsmith, who read poetry at the White House for the Obamas in 2011, originally wanted students to create a piece of literature based on their experiences mindlessly surfing the web.

As the semester went on, that goal was abandoned. Instead, Goldsmith and the class decided that the experiences and memories of the course were more valuable than any “artifact” they could have created, the student who took the class told The College Fix.

The article in Slate pointed out:

“There’s something wonderful about this dogged insistence on having nothing whatsoever to show for your time in class, especially given the cultural rage for productivity. And the seminar courts a drifting boredom that is seductive in its challenge to the cult of mindfulness. But: With the approval of the UPenn English Department, Goldsmith’s crafted a creative writing course that fails to generate any writing, one that to some extent paints basic college benefits like insight, growth, and learning as passé fantasies of the old guard. ‘We don’t do much,’ Goldsmith shrugged at one point, all dunce-cap apologies and haplessness. ‘Most of our experiments go nowhere.’”

According to the website of the English Department, the course is required for creative writing concentrations, and is an elective course for standard English majors. The course description asks, “What if these activities — clicking, SMSing, status-updating, and random surfing — were used as raw material for creating compelling and emotional works of literature?”

Using the base tuition of $49,536 and the minimum of 32 classes needed to graduate, Wasting Time on the Internet cost each student $1,548.

“A lot of us realized that the most interesting parts of our class were the experiences of participating in the internet-based experiments we created each class, rather than whatever artifacts resulted from these experiments,” the student who took the class told The Fix.

Having said that, she found it “hard to really pinpoint… one thing that I learned.” Not disappointed, she described Wasting Time on the Internet as “one of the best classes I’ve ever taken.”

There was no final exam for the class, and final projects were optional, she added.

On the Penn Course Review, other students agreed the class was valuable. Goldsmith’s course received very impressive ratings: 3.5/4 for course quality, 3.5/4 for instructor quality, and 1.7/4 for difficulty.

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