Wasting Time on the Internet by Kenneth Goldsmith Read Free Book Online Page B

searches through a comedy feed he subscribes to and clicks on a long video by the Canadian comedian Russell Peters, which he expands to full screen. Leaning back in his chair, he folds his arms and watches the video along with us. We titter; he smiles. The video is mildly funny and sort of entertaining; he’s just letting it roll. It’s going on for a little too long. I can feel the affect in theform of impatience rising in our room; after all, we were here to watch him waste time on the Internet—to see how he, specifically, wastes time—but now we’re stuck watching an interminable mediocre video. While he is indeed wasting time on the Internet, he’s not playing along to some set of invisible rules the group seems to have invented on the spot. People begin grumbling. Finally, affect converts to full-blown emotion when a woman in the audience challenges him: “You’re not wasting time on the Internet! You’re just trying to entertain us. We came here to watch the way you waste time!” The young man appears to feel her words deeply. He bows his head and apologizes: “This is pretty nerve wracking. I’m sorry but I thought you’d be bored if I wasted time on the Internet the way I normally do. I feel guilty that I wasn’t being entertaining enough, so I thought you’d enjoy this video.” Defeated, he heads back to his seat.
    A nerdy hipster dude in black thick-rimmed glasses struts up to the podium. He sits down with confidence—perhaps even with a bit of smugness—cracks a browser and goes to a password-protected academic site where he downloads an essay by Heidegger. Next he opens Spotify, where he starts streaming some atonal string quartets by Schoenberg. You can feel the eyes beginning to roll in the room. Could this guy be more pretentious? He goes further by streaming a clip of a Godard interview with the sound turned off, at which point people start begging him to sit down. He’s been caught in his performance, which, while it might not have been exactly how he wastes time on the Internet—doesn’t he checkhis Facebook like the rest of us?—belies some grain of truth. He knew his stuff and probably chose to perform a certain curated aspect of his personality. In its own way, what he did was take the opportunity to create a performance by curating a set of cultural artifacts that spoke perhaps of who he was, who he wasn’t, or who he wanted us to think he was. Chances are it was a combination of all three.
    The final time waster is a graduate student who begins admitting her nervousness by stating: “My pulse is jumping.” She settles in and logs on to Facebook. Scrolling through her feed, she pauses and says, “I feel guilty, like I’m exposing my friends on Facebook by doing this in front of one hundred strangers.” I make a mental note about how much guilt is inscribed in these exercises. She then cracks another tab, checks her Yahoo e-mail, and begins streaming Mumford and Sons’ “Little Lion Man” (radio edit) on Pandora, which resembles a soundtrack for a spaghetti Western and gives her performance a cinematic quality; we now feel like we’re watching a movie. Her browsing style is restless and jumpy. Quickly, she is back on Facebook, where she full-screens a clip from Ellen DeGeneres for a brief moment, then closes it. By now, she’s losing her self-consciousness and her surfing becomes rhythmic: first she checks her e-mail, then Facebook, then back to YouTube, over and over. Both structured and restless, this cycle continually repeats with slight variations over the next ten minutes. Her ease and lack of self-consciousness is infectious: I can see the other participants’ body postures change; some have stretched outon the carpeted floor as they watch, their faces open and relaxed. Her online habits have a regularity, which remind me of breathing—drawing breath in, holding