Wasting time on the internet Quotes

“Instagram something with the intention of it being taken down by Instagram. Take a screenshot of it; keep a record of it. Instagram the screenshot. Screenshot that Instagram. If it is taken down again, repeat the process until all you’re posting is a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot . . . of the original photo.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“Take the tech blog Boing Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most visible blogs on the web, but they create very little original content. Rather they act as a filter for the morass of information, pulling up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing they’re linking to. The culture of citation and name-checking on the web has resulted in a cascade of “re-” gestures: retweeting, reblogging, regramming, and reposting”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“This is the subject of an art work by the Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson called ScanOps. The project began in 2007, when Wilson was contracted by a video-production company to work on the Google campus. He noted sharp divisions between the workers; one group, known as ScanOps, were sequestered in their own building. These were data-entry workers, the people to whom those mysterious hands belonged. Wilson became intrigued by them, and began filming them walking to and from their ten-hour shifts in silence. He was able to capture a few minutes of footage before Google security busted him. In a letter to his boss explaining his motives, Wilson remarked that most of the ScanOps workers were people of color. He wrote, “I’m interested in issues of class, race and labor, and so out of general curiosity, I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs.” In short order, he was fired.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“For the past decade, art historians Hito Steyerl and Boris Groys have written in favor of “weak images,” claiming that in the digital age, a weak or cool artifact is more democratic than a strong or hot one.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“The beauty of the Internet is that people can take things, and do what they want with them, to project what they want or feel.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“Your photo of the Eiffel Tower on Flickr is identically redundant to the millions already stored on Flickr, yet you keep on snapping them (just as I keep downloading MP3s).”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“In Flusserian terms, it doesn’t really matter what we tweet (content); it just matters that we keep tweeting (apparatus). For Flusser, the content of any medium is always the series of apparatuses that produced it.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

“If I thought I was only doing one thing—running—I would be naïve. Even in my leisure, when strapped to a web-enabled device, I’m furiously multitasking and, in a very positive way, highly distracted.”
― Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet