If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
Nguyen is not alone in this experience. BookTok, TikTok’s sprawling, informal literary community, has pushed many people to read outside of their usual interests. You don’t need to dig deep into X, Reddit, or Instagram to find reading suggestions that would never appear on end-of-year lists in newspapers or magazines, or on lists of major annual awards. Obscure literary titles reach people they might not have touched before.
But if we accept Nguyen’s proposition and conclude that some of us read fewer bad books and get to what we like more quickly, does this really constitute an improvement in reading culture?
Let’s place our hypothetical friend Dave, a military history buff, in a book club that requires him to read a whole bunch of books he might never have read – the majority of which he finds useless and a waste of time. The club also provides an in-person community of friends with whom he can debate and disagree and even discuss which book to queue up next. Dave might not read many more books than he would without the club, and he might enjoy the ones he does read less; the quality of the information it receives may even deteriorate. He might find himself in the same Reddit threads, looking for things tailored to his interests.
But there are social benefits to reading something together. Maybe someone could pull him out of his narrow range of interests. The experience of reading can benefit from the more difficult mental terrain that books offer; the boredom and impatience that longer texts sometimes inspire can help push and stimulate thinking more than perfectly distilled things.
I asked Nguyen if she thought her vision of a more refined online reading audience could obviate the need for an in-person book club, literary society, or writing workshop. She said that while social media and Internet-based book learning likely speed up exploration, they could also, in her experience, restrict people almost entirely to their own tastes. “You have the opportunity to create a more impermeable filter bubble,” she said.
Social media does create powerful consensus—on the Internet, everything tends to grow rapidly toward a single source of light—and it can be argued that a slower, more fractured network of in-person, localized argumentation might ultimately offer greater 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 misplaced nostalgia for the idea of artists and writers meeting in physical spaces with similar goals in mind. “It feels inherently more dynamic if it’s in a physical space than if you’re Substacking Notes at the same time as all your friends are posting to Substack Notes,” she said. But she also pointed out that such moves tend to be rather internal, and that many of the most successful writers on platforms like Substack are people who may not exactly fit in with the New York literati. This seems undeniably true to me. It might be nice to go to the same bars, contribute to the same small newspapers, and look very seriously at the same works of art in the same galleries, but such a life today seems both anachronistic and boring.
In another of his notes to writers, Nguyen proclaims:
I’ve tried similar tactics in the past, especially when writing about specific topics, such as education policy or AI. But what I discovered wasn’t really a sharper view, but rather an increased focus on social media consensus, which was largely dictated by the people who posted the most on a given topic. Even in times when I wasn’t writing directly about a tweet I saw, I was still pointing towards it. Writing, in this form, felt more like sticking a comment bubble onto an aggregated feed of news, social media posts, and an assortment of video podcasts. Most pundits – at least those who comment on the world in columns, newsletters or podcasts – do this in one way or another. Taken together, these scriptures form “the discourse.”
