Creative writing students at the University of Pennsylvania will finally get a chance to major in what every undergrad dreams of: wasting time on the internet.

Poet, UbuWeb founder and professor Kenneth Goldsmith is teaching a weekly class next semester which requires students to "stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs".

Appropriately, the seminar is titled "Wasting time on the internet". The only course materials needed are a wi-fi connection and a laptop.

Unlike the conventional wisdom about procrastinating online, Goldsmith believes that enforcing a state of "distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting" might prove as creatively fertile as automatic writing was for the Surrealist writers.