If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?

The internet is training us to expect optimized experiences, Jay Caspian Kang argues.

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Illustration by Mark Harris

If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?

Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.

By Jay Caspian Kang, a New Yorker staff writer and the host of “Time To Say Goodbye”

Here’s a thought many of us have these days: if only we weren’t on our damn phones all the time, we would surely unlock a better self—one that went on hikes and talked more with our children and felt less rank jealousy about other people’s successes. It’s a nice idea; once a day, at least, I wonder what my life would be like if I smashed my phone into bits and never contacted AppleCare. Would I become a scratch golfer or one of those fathers who does thousand-piece puzzles with his children? Would I direct ambitious films that capture the Zeitgeist? Would I at least read more difficult novels?

The unrest about smartphones and social-media addiction has been growing for years and shows no signs of abating. I have felt the panic myself, and so, this past July, with a book deadline looming, I got off of social media. The break started with X, which was my biggest problem, but, by the end of August or so, Instagram, TikTok, and pretty much anything that allowed me to argue with strangers had been deleted from my phone. Before this, I was spending roughly ten hours a day looking at my phone or sitting at my desktop computer. I didn’t need that number to come down, but, when I checked my weekly status report, I wanted all the brightly colored little bars that track the number of hours I’d spent on time-wasting apps to be relocated to the word-processing app that I use to write my books.

The plan worked, more or less. I finished a draft of the book on time. But the other imagined effects of a social-media detox never quite materialized, at least not in a noticeable way. I was especially hoping that I would start reading more books, because I have found that enviable prose prompts me to try to write my own, not necessarily out of a sense of inspiration but rather out of fear that if I don’t hurry up and start typing, I’ll fall behind. And yet, the chief effect, I found, was that I simply didn’t know what was happening in the world. That was nice enough, but all those books I had hoped to read never found their way into my hands.

One of the more common doomsday scenarios about social media goes something like this: an internet-addicted public, hooked on the dopamine hits of engagement and the immediate satisfaction of short-form video, loses its ability to read books and gets stupider and more reactionary as a result. Frankly, I am not immune to this fear—not only because it is my job to write articles and books but because I think it’s good for people to read books, full stop. And the statistics regarding our collective reading habits are not pretty. In a recent National Literacy Trust survey of seventy-six thousand children, aged eight to eighteen, only one in five said they read something daily in their free time, a historically low mark for the survey. In a National Endowment for the Arts poll conducted in 2022, the number of adults who said they had read at least one book in the past year dipped below fifty per cent, down roughly ten per cent from a decade before.

Does that mean that people are less literate in general? Counterintuitively, there has never been a time in history when people have spent more time reading words, even if it’s just text messages on their phones. We can agree that most of this reading is less edifying than books are, but I do wonder if the downturn in book reading, and its relationship to our online habits, might be more complicated than we are inclined to conclude. It is, for instance, much easier to find information now—information we might once have looked for in books, say, and also information about the books we might consider reading. Maybe, in the age of the internet, many of us, as informed readers, only want to read one book, tailored very specifically to our interests, every couple of years.

Does that explain a lot of what’s happening? Probably not; more likely, most of us are just stuck in our phones more. Still, I do believe we need to change how we think about literacy, and what it means. Imagine a guy; let’s call him Dave. He’s a busy lawyer who lives in the Midwest and has a keen interest in American military history. On Reddit, he finds a community of people who share their favorite titles on the subject. Over time, in this forum, Dave learns which of his fellow-posters are aligned with his own tastes. He becomes choosier about which books he reads—a more efficient reader, in a sense, though one who may read fewer books. Dave also listens to podcasts, watches long YouTube videos, and even participates in live-stream seminars about his favorite moments from the Battle of Antietam, or whatever. Is Dave less informed—less literate?—than he would have been had he read three books that year instead of two?

Asecond, related question: can our online lives actually replicate that craggy, slow feeling of an in-person book club or classroom? Or is there something about the internet’s recommendation architecture and its instant provision of information that turns everything into a speedy optimization run?

I started thinking about this question after reading a list by the writer Celine Nguyen titled “Notes on being a writer in the 21st century.” Nguyen, who publishes heady critical essays on Substack, has some appealingly contrarian thoughts. For instance, she points out that “well before AI slop, we had human-generated slop.” And she makes a convincing case that social media and the internet might cause people to read smarter, even if it also causes them to read fewer books:

A lot of the books that I now think of as foundational to how I see the world, I found out about because people would post on Reddit or Twitter. That is something special about the internet: That you do not need to be in the right social context where these things are automatically accessible to you.

Nguyen is hardly alone in this experience. BookTok, the sprawling and informal literary community on TikTok, has pushed many people to read outside their usual interests. You don’t have to dig deep into X, Reddit, or Instagram to find reading suggestions that would never appear on the year-end lists in newspapers or magazines, or on the rolls of the major annual awards. Obscure literary titles are reaching people they might not have reached before.

But, if we accept Nguyen’s proposition, and conclude that some of us are slogging through fewer bad books and getting more quickly to the stuff we like, does that actually constitute an improvement in reading culture?

Let’s place our hypothetical friend Dave, the military-history buff, in a book club that requires him to read a whole bunch of books he might have never picked up—the majority of which he finds pointless and a waste of his time. The club also provides a community of in-person friends with whom he can debate and disagree and even argue about what book should be next on the queue. Dave might not read many more books than he would have without the club, and he may enjoy the ones he reads less; the quality of the information he’s receiving may even deteriorate. He might find himself back in the same Reddit threads, hunting down things that are tailored to his interests.

But there are social benefits to reading something together. Someone might be able to jolt him out of his narrow tranche of interests. The experience of reading can benefit from the rockier mental terrain that books provide; the boredom and impatience that longer texts sometimes inspire can help push and prod one’s thinking more than things that are perfectly distilled.

I asked Nguyen whether she felt that her vision of a more finely tuned and online reading public might obviate the need for the in-person book club or literary society or writing workshop. She said that although social media and learning about books through the internet likely accelerated exploration, it also could, in her experience, restrict people almost entirely to their own tastes. “You have the ability to create a filter bubble that’s more impermeable,” she said.

Social media does create a powerful consensus—on the internet, everything tends to grow quickly toward one source of light— and an argument can be made that a slower, more fractured network of in-person, localized arguments might ultimately offer up more intellectual variety. When I asked Nguyen about this, she mentioned the Ninth Street Women, a group of Abstract Expressionist artists who worked in the postwar period, and her own displaced nostalgia for the idea of artists and writers meeting in physical spaces with similar goals in mind. “It just inherently feels more vibrant if it’s in a physical space than if you Substack notes at the same time that all your friends are posting on Substack notes,” she said. But she also pointed out that such movements tend to be quite insidery, and that a lot of the most successful writers on platforms like Substack are people who might not exactly fit into the New York City literati. This seems undeniably true to me. It might be nice to go to the same bars and contribute to the same small journals and stare very seriously at the same art work in the same galleries, but such a life feels both anachronistic and annoying today.

In another of her notes for writers, Nguyen proclaims:

I, controversially, am pro-social media. If you are writing about art, you just make all your social media about contemporary art and art critics and new art releases, and you create this funneled world that reinforces the thing you’re trying to do.

I have tried similar tactics in the past, especially when I was writing about specific subjects, such as education policy or A.I. But what I found wasn’t really a sharpening of insight, but, rather, a tightened focus on the social-media consensus, which was largely dictated by the people who posted the most on any given topic. Even in moments when I wasn’t writing directly about some tweet I had seen, I was still gesturing toward it. Writing, in this form, felt more like sticking a comment bubble on an aggregated stream of news stories, social-media posts, and an assortment of video podcasts. Most pundits—at least those who comment on the world in columns, newsletters, or on podcasts—are doing some form of this. Taken together, such writing forms “the discourse.”

Aggregation, for what it’s worth, is also what large language models can most capably replicate. ChatGPT can’t report new facts or provide much atmospheric detail, but it can inhale everything that’s been written on a specific subject, organize the material, and present it in an orderly fashion. Nguyen’s advice may be correct, but, if it is—and given the popularity of newsletters and political commentary and the decline of the novel and even the big doorstop biography—the future of human writing would seem to be headed directly into the jaws of the A.I. machine.

How do we respond? Do we seek out formal and stylistic breaks that feel authentically human? Or does everything start to look like slop? And can our attempts to find non-sloppified prose outpace the stylistic variations that the L.L.M.s might be able to generate on their own? Some of the most innovative formal experiments I’ve seen recently have appeared on Substack—including, whatever else you may think of it, Ryan Lizza’s recent serialized, scandalous tell-all about his ex-fiancée, Olivia Nuzzi. Not all writing on social media or in nontraditional forms has turned into slop. But there is value in resisting pure optimization, aggregation, and specialization. Not only for the sake of the humanity of the written word but also because it can be quite lonely at the bottom of a rabbit hole. ♦

How has the internet changed your reading habits? Let us know in the comments. On Thursday at 2 p.m. ET, Jay will discuss this piece in our subscriber chat.

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