Kenneth Goldsmith

This book presents a scholarly defense of the validity and art of human interaction online, an extended academic rephrasing of the argument made time and again on Tumblr and other vibrant online communities: conversation, dialogue, and communication through the internet are genuine, innovative, and do not indicate the downfall of humanity.
The aspects of Goldsmith's argument that made it more effective were his comparison to the surrealist movement, his classroom experiments in the show more application of these ideas, and most significantly, his comparison with various modern art exhibits. Goldsmith venerates internet culture as art, inevitable from his background as a poet, a professor, and poet laureate for the Museum of Modern Art. This leads to a pervasive sense of wonder throughout, which is largely charming but occasionally nauseating. Goldsmith also adopts a rather narrow perspective, that of someone with the means for constant connection to the internet and the art education to look at it without much thought to access problems, or the limits of practicality.
Goldsmith asserts that we should look at the internet as a massive arena for creativity, innovative in its technology but not its basic motivations for interaction. The reasoning that brings him to this conclusion, although from the lofty perspective of a self-proclaimed intellectual, are nonetheless interesting and worthwhile. show less

I saw a cover shot and a short blurb review for this in a magazine and thought it seemed like it should be an amusing bit of fluff, so I picked it up the next time I went to the library. I should have remembered the old adage about books and their covers.

The introduction and first chapter are fun, especially when the author writes about the actual college course he presented called "Wasting Time on the Internet." It's a pretty interesting study in group dynamics and modern tech habits. show more There's probably a pretty cool documentary to be made there.

But then Goldsmith stops being anecdotal and gets academic. The rest of the chapters basically outline how decades or even centuries ago various writers, painters, photographers and other artists were doing the same things being done now on the internet or roughly predicted how we would behave when something like the internet came to be. His comparison of art history and the internet seems to point to the conclusions that everything old is new again (or "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again") and that the democratization effect of the internet makes us all artists in our own right if we so choose to declare our time wasting as such. All this is not as fun as the first chunks, but tolerably interesting.

I had to grit my teeth while reading the back-of-the-book list of 101 suggestions of how to waste time on the internet as so many of them depend on pranking, annoying, inconveniencing or disrespecting other people. "How to be an asshole on the internet" may have been a better title, says the uptight control freak in me. show less

Haphazardly stumbles through a whistle-stop of oblique philosophical concepts, which steer it toward a clinical academic visage increasingly uninteresting to read, consistently failing to elaborate on any grounding argument or compelling synthesis. Instead, it appears more akin to a surface-level literature review or seminar ramble, probably impenetrable (certainly in many cases for me) if you're not largely familiar with the niche pop culture artefacts or theories he summons throughout. Not show more to suggest this is a fault of the author, although in the times I felt engaged, he quickly progresses toward another analogy without any worthwhile prodding or grounding argument. Above all, his central ethos is defending the internet from its stereotypical lambasting as a "zombie" tool dissociating humans from the physical, instead proposing it acts as a modern 'library of babel' allowing us to become more intimately invested in our passions & self-identity than any medium preceding it. One element I found fascinating was the "digital flaneur", and how commercial aspects derive the internet of its ability to thrive as a democratised resource. Curation is an interesting field to me, and in this context allows me to justify my daunting .mp3 collection, as our constant curation is a mode of engagement immutable from the internet -- it appears increasingly how content itself is subordinated to the action of acquiring as a conceptual gesture. Especially amidst megaleaks & breathtaking data dumps; the joy of liberating information & artwork cannot be subdued. show less

Full of typos and, not unlike "Against Expression", marred by faulty argumentation and contradictions, "Uncreative Writing" is rich in examples and the topics of "uncreativity", plagiarism, detournement and so on are explored well enough. Goldsmith also discusses here some of his experiences with students who had picked his "uncreative writing" course. Once you read this and maybe also try to go through the same exercises... you'll either love or hate these approaches. But you'll arrive at show more conclusions with definitely better understanding. It is questionable what Goldsmith terms by "success" or "failure" in conceptual writing - probably one just have to not take things for granted while going for "precision". That on some pages he invokes identity politics, emotion or ecology and on other pages he simply praises outright theft (while the book itself contains a proper copyright section), exploitation or being downright transgressive is, again, all part of the bundle...

As idealist as one would like to be, there are many points here to keep in mind. Towards the end of the book, Christian Bök's words on his Xenotext experiment and the transhumanist necessity of considering the perpetuation of poetry through considering non-human readership. Or, in other words, "if poetry already lacks any meaningful readership among our own anthropoid population, what have we to lose by writing poetry for a robotic culture that must inevitably succeed our own? If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it."

Considering the reading skills (and especially reading expectations) of many people nowadays or, more likely, at any given time, it sounds like complex writing such as that of Joyce or of Bök himself will be definitely more popular among the non-human population. But for every RACTER story (of arguable success) there is a Tay story (of unintended effects...). So there you go... show less