Wasting Time on the Internet (5 page)

When I e-mail a resume to apply for a job, my affectual state flickers somewhere between nervousness and hope. When I receive a response from that query, my affect is anticipation that will undoubtedly convert to emotion once I open the mail. Because of the time lag—an interval of even microseconds—online communications are affective in every way; most likely the receiver of that e-mail is also in an affective state. Watching someone await a response to a text message is a demonstration of anticipatory affect in that interval. In this way, the web is telepathic: we send an e-mail, post a status update, send a Facebook message, and then we wait, anticipating the nature of the response. Web communication is like fishing; dropping a line in the water and hoping that something will bite. But because we are addressing the entire world—an unprecedented situation—we don't really know to whom we are speaking, which sometimes results in tragic misunderstanding and miscommunication: we thought we were doing one thing but it turns out we were doing something else. Still, it is telepathy that makes the vast connections possible—between writers and readers, coders and viewers, followers and friends, not to mention members of online communities—all of which is transmitted by affect.

The content of Wi-Fi is radio, an earlier affectual wireless transmission technology. Ezra Pound, writing in 1934, famously called the artist “the antennae of the race.” Pound used a new technological metaphor—the radio antenna—in order to propose a visionary occult use for it. As few artists were exclusively using radio as their medium, Pound was using new technology to describe very old media: sculpture,
painting, and poetry. In this way, Pound was referring to what has become known as “hauntology,” a term invented by Jacques Derrida to describe “the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive,” which also describes the way newer media is haunted by the old. In the nineteenth century, séances used machines such as the Ouija board through which voices and ideas, many of them long dead, were transmitted to the living—literally as “ghosts in the machine”; our twenty-first-century Wi-Fi transmissions bear eerie similarities.

Like the occult, affect works against narrative: it isn't conclusive or curative; instead, it's static, continual, hovering, and conditional. As a result, my class had no denouement or dramatic conclusion. In a room full of machines and gadgets it was, ironically, the body and its small human gestures—the affective gestures—that drove the class. People say that technology creates distance between people, but we found it to be just the opposite: our physical and emotive experiences were intensified through our devices. By merging our bodies with the network, we became highly attuned and acutely sensitive to everyone in the room. The class's success was predicated on our bodies being together in the same space. Telecommuting or a MOOC (massive online open course) would simply have reified typically distanced ways of being online; our experience was, to put it mildly, rather atypical. In that room, every action was a transmission. Something as simple as students turning their laptops around to share with the class what they discovered while wasting time on
the Internet triggered a series of electric responses, ones that pierced every body and mind in the room. It was, literally, a meatspace social network.

I'm in a large room in Berlin—where I've been brought to lead a four-hour workshop—on a gray, rainy Saturday afternoon wasting time on the Internet with a hundred people. They've all been required to bring their laptops and devices, which are connected to a lightning-speed Wi-Fi connection. I start by telling the group a story about how I once had a student who did a project in which he took his bank PIN code, blew it up huge on a flag, and ran it up a flagpole in the center of campus in the middle of the night when no one was looking. The next day, his PIN—his most private information—was there for all to see. Of course, nobody knew the meaning of this strange string of numbers, and even if someone could figure out that it was a PIN, they'd have no idea to which account it was attached. Within a few hours, the flag was removed. His finances were untouched.

Extending the laptop data-invasion exercise I did with my class, I proposed the following: might we be able to go a step further and share our passwords with one another? I ask if anyone wants to share their password with the group. My request is met with dead silence. I can see I'm not going to get too far with this one. So instead, I demonstrate the
way I construct my passwords. I crack open a Word document and make the font really big, which is projected on a screen behind me. I explain to one hundred total strangers the formula I use to create my passwords. I show them how every password I make begins with the names of the site beginning with a capital letter—Yahoo, for instance—which is then followed by a scientist's first and last name, trailed by the last four digits of one of my old landline numbers, ending with two exclamation points. So, a typical password of mine would be YahooStephenHawking6830!! or AmazonMaxPlanck2448!! The elements I chose are indicative of who I am, including my nerdy fascination for science and nostalgia for the many phone numbers I've had throughout my life, each one evoking a flood of memories every time I type them.

I ask anyone else if they would like to come up in front of the workshop and demonstrate how they make their passwords. A woman volunteers, showing us her technique, which always includes the number 410. When asked why, she said that when she was a child growing up in Denmark, 4:10 was the time her favorite television show aired. Suddenly, the room lights up with conversation. It turns out that this particular show was aired all over Europe at that identical time and many of these international participants have deep connections to this show as well. The animated memories and chatter go on for quite a while before another gentleman steps up and proceeds to walk us through his passwords. It's very confusing and no one in the room can understand it
at all, which is his intention. As he explains it to us, he is a trained cryptographer, a lover of puzzles. His passwords are completely logical, but it's a different type of logic. What's beginning to emerge among the participants is that passwords are much more than something we use to get into locked rooms: they are tiny self-portraits constructed with fragments of autobiographical data that unwittingly convey who we are and how we think. Even those generic security questions you get asked are steeped in awkwardly intimate autobiography: “What is the first name of the person you first kissed?” or “What is the last name of the teacher who gave you your first failing grade?”

Next, taking a page from my Penn class, I ask everyone to cue up one song on YouTube, then full-screen it. At the same moment, everyone hits Play. The room fills up with a cacophony of one hundred different songs played from tinny speakers. Afterward, people get up to speak about what song they chose, why they chose it, and by doing so, what sort of message they were trying to project about themselves to the others. As it turns out, everyone has a reason for choosing the song they did. One man played a rap video from Tyler the Creator that his sixteen-year-old son had showed him that morning over breakfast; another woman played a current earworm, one she claimed to be her soundtrack for the summer, already laden with memories on this early mid-June day; an older gentleman played an alternative British national anthem, one he said expressed his strong political sentiments.

One song rises above the din. It's Taylor Swift's “Shake It Off,” the one song everyone in the room seems to know, and because of its iconic pop hooks the one song ringing in everyone's ears long after all the other videos have been turned off. I have everyone cue up the same YouTube video of “Shake It Off.” Again, at the count of three, everyone hits Play at the identical instant. One hundred laptops are displaying the first moment of the video, a row of ballet dancers at a barre doing stretches to the heavy drumbeat that begins the song. The row of dancers in the video extends to infinity across this large room like an endless Rockettes kick line. On a hundred screens, a hundred Taylor Swifts emerge from the clusters of dancers, turn toward the camera, and sing, “I stay up too late, got nothing in my brain, that's what people say.” But then a lovely computer glitch happens. Due to the various laptop processing speeds and the way they connect differently to the Internet, the videos begin to play off-kilter, with some laptops ten seconds ahead and others ten seconds behind. The room becomes a large echo chamber and as the four-minute video unfurls, the asynchronization becomes more and more pronounced. The pop song is starting to sound like one of Steve Reich's early tape-loop pieces, in which two reel-to-reel recorders play an identical tape loop simultaneously. As they play, they gradually fall out of sync with one another due to microscopic differences in the machines' playback speeds, resulting in psychedelic echoes and overlays, which is what's happened to poor Taylor Swift. Gradually, the room grows quieter as each video winds down
at a different speed, then ends. Finally, the slowest laptop in the room finishes—a solo performance that mimics the final shot of the video, with Taylor Swift dropping to the ground among a troupe of perfectly poised ballerinas. It's simply poetic.

Next, I have everyone open their laptops and log on to Facebook, then walk away from their computers. For the next fifteen minutes, anyone can approach any laptop and enter whatever they like in the status update windows. There's great trepidation as the participants gingerly eyeball the laptops. I see them think for a moment, then timidly type something in the window and move on to another computer. But within a few minutes, they're fully engaged, banging words into other people's lives. Some enter benign comments: “Have a nice day!” Others are more self-reflective: “You know this is not me.” “I am wasting time on the Internet.” “Kenneth Goldsmith made me do this.” Others yet are laden with moral sentiment: “This feels so wrong to be typing into someone else's Facebook page.” Several people type surrealistic sentences, nonsensical words, and spontaneous poems in the boxes. Like graffiti taggers, a few participants enter the identical cryptic phrase into each and every computer, marking their territory. When it's over, I ask several people to read what other people wrote. The room is tense. Some people smile knowingly when they hear their words read aloud; others are horrified as they read what's been scrawled on their walls. The room becomes an emotive echo chamber, with feelings zooming around the room,
bouncing off Facebook pages, and back into the room again. The affect also extends outside of the room: sure enough, phones start buzzing with friends and family contacting the participants to ask if everything is alright, and if they know their Facebook accounts have been hacked. Everyone has a lot of explaining to do.

Next I ask for volunteers to come to the front of the room and waste time on the Internet publicly for all to see on the computer, which is projected on a large screen behind them. A young man approaches, his hands trembling as he logs on to Facebook. His cursor jitters, a digital manifestation of his physical condition. He hesitates, then checks his e-mail, looks at his work schedule, and deletes a wad of spam. He scrolls through Facebook, zooming past many items, slowing down to play each and every video for a split second. His web activity is an extension of his mind: we can almost see what he is thinking when he zooms past certain items on his feed or when he lingers on others.

He's been silent the entire time, but increasingly looks out at us to gauge our reaction. The more he looks at us, the more self-conscious of his actions we feel him become. He goes to YouTube and 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 the
form 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.