Is wasting time on the internet actually good for you? Read this and find out
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Version 0 of 1. The question of whether the huge, distracting influence of online time-wasting has a good, bad or irrelevant impact on our creative output is so new that there aren’t any definitive answers, yet. But it is starting to be studied. The University of Pennsylvania announced this week that it would offer a publicity-grabbing course next year called “Wasting time on the Internet”, in which students will be asked to “focus on the alchemical recuperation of aimless surfing into substantial works of literature.” Aimless surfing, the course website clarifies, means “only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs.” The man running the course is Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and conceptual artist with a talent for headline-grabbing stunts, including, as Gawker reminds us, the time he tried to print out the entire internet. But the idea that futzing around online might actually enrich creative thought is interesting – and counter to expectation. We know, anecdotally and from various studies, that taking some time away from the internet can ease mental blockages. Sleep is believed to allow subconscious processes that boost creative thinking. Tennyson, when he was stuck on a poem, went for long walks. In The Longest Silence, Thomas McGuane’s excellent book on fly-fishing, he says that in both writing and fishing, “the slack line catches the biggest fish.” Then again, no line is slacker than when you’re sitting at your desk scrolling through Facebook: maybe the sheer banality of it could induce the kind of fugue state that allows ideas to flourish. The real problem in all these studies, perhaps, is that using the internet to quickly refresh one’s brain and sitting there for hours mindlessly consuming click-bait are not the same thing. There’s a point past which time on the internet is not a break from more valuable activities, but a total replacement for them. Meanwhile, we kid ourselves we are “contributing” in some meaningful way when we’re online. The absence from online forums of many of those who have traditionally dominated the conversation in print is perceived as a noble gesture that is also a mild rebuke: Shouldn’t we all be biting our tongues a little more? The background chatter can be so perversive and demoralising that the only adequate response is retaliatory silence. Twitter and its ilk will make monks of all of us yet. Earlier this month, Michel Faber, a novelist with less name recognition than you would expect from someone who has sold millions of books, said at an event in London, “I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write. I think I’ve reached the limit.” He joins Philip Roth, whose retirement seems to be holding, and Alice Munro, who seems to be wavering in hers. Because their output is so creaking, novelists never quite have the impact of Frank Sinatra’s endless comebacks from retirement, but they do – like many of us – seem to struggle with warring impulses to speak and shut up. In Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II, Scott – the personal assistant to the novelist hero – says that “the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.” Scott is a sneak and a saboteur, so his grandiloquence is being sent up by DeLillo. Still, you can hear a certain longing from the author in the quote, both for the state of perfection that a novel – or any creative project - exists in while it’s still hypothetical, and for a more basic desire for the peace and quiet concentration requires. I think I read that on Twitter. |