Wasting Time on the Internet Course at UPenn Aims at Exploring 'the New Surrealism'

The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) is now offering a course that many of its Ivy League students may not know much about, Wasting Time on the Internet.

According to USA Today, the course embraces technology and the Internet age by "reframing" how much time people spend online. The creative writing course, taught by Kenneth Goldsmith, said he wanted to dismantle the bad rep surfing the web sometimes gets.

For the course, which only requires a laptop (since you can get a Wi-Fi connection just about anywhere), will take all those tweets and puppy photos and produce a work of literature.

"It came about with my frustration over having read article after article about how the Internet is making us dumber," Goldsmith told USA Today. "I don't think that's true. We're reading and writing more than we ever have; we're sharing ideas and learning in ways that cannot be measured."

Wasting Time on the Internet will meet once a week for three hours and class discussions will be held in chat rooms, forums and social media.

"We spend our lives in front of screens, mostly wasting time: checking social media, watching cat videos, chatting, and shopping," the course description reads. "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 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?"

Goldsmith said the course will focus in part on surrealism, which is brought on by splitting attention between a BuzzFeed list one saw on Facebook while listening to a podcast and trying to complete a daily task, for instance.

"We're trying to wrench an artistic product out of that state of distraction that's naturally created by talking on the phone with someone and surfing the internet at the same time, or by watching a video and chatting," he told Motherboard. "That's the desired state in the class-even half being there is too generous. I want their attention across tablets, phones, screens, music. I want it divided many, many times.

"Electronic distraction and multitasking is the new surrealism-surrealists wanted to get unconscious, well, we're doing that now all the time."