In one of his latest articles ‘It’s a Mistake to Mistake Content for Content’ for Los Angeles Review of Books, the poet and founder of UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith mentions the consumption of goods of Internet – reminiscent of what Terre Thaemlitz says in our latest issue about mp3s as a commodity and the-almost-violent-act of downloading whatever we encounter that appeals to us. By recalling some parts of the book Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), by media critic and philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), Goldsmith points out how one should obey the rules of social media, such as the 140 count of Twitter, in order to exist in our times.
On June 20th, the writer of Uncreative Writing, gave a workshop based on the course he conducts at University of Pennysilvania called ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’, as a part of Concentration organized by the literary group Fiktion at HKW. Lately, the course itself created such a fuzz that led Goldsmith to write on The New Yorker ‘Why I Am Teaching a Course Called Wasting Time on The Internet’. The workshop continued with picking ideas: the idea of quantified self and how creating password is such a literary act like an autobiography… Beyond that, what the poet said about the notion of concentration of our era was appealing. On the contrary to what is usually said, we do focus! In metros, for instance, people stare at their screens w/o even noticing their surroundings. Recently, I even heard of a person who fell and broke her nose because of checking her facebook on an iPhone whilst walking…
