Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Jake Caspian Kang, staff writer at The New Yorker, has a new piece in his Fault Lines column, asking whether quitting social media actually leads us back to reading books, or whether the relationship between our screens and our reading lives is more complicated than that familiar narrative suggests. He also raises maybe a bigger question. What does literacy even mean when we actually spend more time than ever reading, but it's online, not so much in books? Jay Caspian Kang joins us now. Jay, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jay Caspian Kang: Great, thank you. It's good to be back.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our phones are open. How does social media affect your other reading habits? In particular, we're going to hear Jay's experience along these lines. If you have ever tried a social media or, let's say, smartphone detox, what did you actually do more of? Did you read more books or anything else, 212-433-WNYC, or what are your observations on the relationship between our online lives and reading? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Jay, last summer, I see, you did take a step away from social media. What did you do, and with what purpose?

Jay Caspian Kang: Well, I was trying to finish a book, and I had a deadline coming up. I was a little worried that I wasn't going to hit it. I just thought, "Well, if I get off Twitter, if I get off TikTok, Instagram, whatever, then I'll have some more time. I had done this before, and it had worked. Yes, I got off, and then I finished the book quite quickly after that. I think in terms of that, it was a great way to optimize my hours into work.

I was also hoping that everything that I had read about attention spans getting shorter because of social media, and the fact that short-form video was particularly toxic to all of this, and that coupled with all the stuff I had read about how people don't read anymore, that this would lead me to read way more books. I was actually quite intentional about it. I was like, "All right, I'm going to try and read more books, now that I don't have to read Twitter anymore." That part of it didn't happen, and so the column I wrote was just musing on why maybe that didn't happen.

Brian Lehrer: What did happen? What did you do more of during your social media detox, other than finish your book?

Jay Caspian Kang: [chuckles] I tried to learn how to play golf, but [chuckles] actually quite intensely. I went to the driving range almost every day and hit 200 golf balls. One near my house, and then that didn't go very well because of athletic limitations, I think, that I face. [laughs] After that, I just got back on social media. Yes, mostly, it was channeled into hitting golf balls, which I would say is probably better than reading Twitter or Instagram and getting mad at your friends and colleagues. Yes, the book part never happened, which I was quite disappointed by because I thought that this would be an intellectually edifying time in my life.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Social media use has absolutely quashed my reading of magazines and books. I used to be an avid reader of anything printed on paper. Now, I don't touch it. It makes me very sad. I used to have a really great attention span. Now, I have zero," writes that listener. You highlight two, maybe contradictory data points.

A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts survey showing that fewer than half of adults read even one book the year before, and a recent National Literacy Trust study finding that only about 1 in 5 kids reads daily for fun, but then you write, "Does that mean that people are less literate in general? Counterintuitively, there has never been a time in history where people have spent more time reading words, even if it's just text messages on their phones." What's the meaning that you take from that contradiction?

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, I started thinking about that honestly 20 years ago, even before social media really existed, and that I was in graduate school. People back then were bemoaning the death of reading because we were all trying to write novels. There's this idea that nobody was reading anymore. It just seemed quite obvious to me and some of my friends that people actually read more because they read websites. They read all sorts of newspapers. They were engaged with the printed word in a way that they weren't before.

There's always this question of, "Well, if you read a site 20 years ago, it would have been something like Gawker," right? You're not reading novels anymore. You're not reading the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or whatever. Is that a net loss in terms of literacy? Is that a net loss in terms of what you understand in terms of the written word and how you, I guess, as a writer, artistically think about what a sentence is, like those types of questions?

I guess all of that has just been accelerated now, I think, that we probably read all the time, like all day long, if your screen time is anything like mine, over four hours a day, where you're looking at your phone. People weren't reading books for four or five hours a day in our childhoods, right? Maybe an hour, two hours. People do read more, and they just don't read books. I don't know. I think one of the questions that I have always had is just, "Well, is there a net loss from that?" Is there a net loss from people reading something as silly as a group text with their friends or something like that compared to reading a book in a book club or whatever?

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I uninstalled Reddit two weeks ago and since finished Project Hail Mary. Just started Dune again. My capacity to focus at work has improved." Francesca in Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Francesca.

Francesca: Oh, my gosh, I can't believe it. Hi, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, how are you? What you got?

Francesca: Good. Okay, so I'm a 31-year-old in Jersey City, and I-- what you call it? I have ADHD. I'm diagnosed with ADHD. I was on medication for it and everything. I quit TikTok and all kinds of shorts. I deleted Instagram, all that stuff, but I kept YouTube Premium for educational content. I started immediately reading novels and stuff. I'm actually working on my very own historical fiction novel right now, based on the pre-Israelite culture, the Canaanites.

Brian Lehrer: Huh, so you think that by quitting short-form social media, it's affected your attention span to the point where you're able to write a book, not just read one.

Francesca: Yes, yes, I've always been creative. I'm a musician, and I've always written concept records. It was right there under the surface. As soon as I stopped with all the attention span-sucking content, I had a book in me, and I just started writing it.

Brian Lehrer: Francesca, thank you very much. Do you remember, Jay? There was a moment. I don't even remember where it was written or who said it. When the internet was newer, at the same time, there were more diagnoses of ADHD being made. Maybe just people knew how to look for it better, but the theory from somebody was that ADHD was flourishing because in the internet era, it was adaptive. It was not a disease. It was adapting to a capability that people were evolving toward. I don't know if anybody believes that anymore.

Jay Caspian Kang: Well, I don't know. The attention-span question is really interesting to me, because I agree that there are ways in which terrible forms of social media can take over your life and make you feel very scattered in a way that's quite, I think, not just like-- I don't even think it's bad for your attention span or your ability to concentrate. It's just unpleasant at a very base human level, right? Just to feel like there's 15 things going on.

I would say that there are YouTube videos now that are three hours long, that people are recording four-hour-long podcasts, and that people are willing to do deep dives into topics. These are not just journalists or media people that I know, but people in my personal life where they cover a breadth of interests and material down a rabbit hole, I think is the term that people would use, that takes an immense amount of attention, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jay Caspian Kang: I think that it's just different. I think that people hyper-focus a bit more because the amount of information is so large that they're able to do that. This is a theory that I don't know if I even believe, but it's one that I try and posit because my column, sometimes it's just me asking questions and thinking through them, even if I don't really know the answer. Is it just that we're faster at discarding the things that we're not interested in?

Whereas in the past, maybe we were better because there were less options that we were willing to be a little bit more patient with some stuff that we didn't like, or is it something like the fact that let's say that-- This is one of the hypotheticals I talk about, which is like, let's say that you're a person who is interested in military history. Before, you would have to slog through all these books that came out. You go to the bookstore, and you'd find some books. Maybe you didn't like them all, but then you go on Reddit, and then you find this community of people who are into military history books.

Then over time, you get to know the people that you trust, and then you don't have to go through that process anymore, and that you can just mainline the books that you like and the titles that you like, and that everything is optimized to your taste. I don't know. I think part of that is happening, but I also don't know if that's good, right? I kind of think that's bad. I think it's good to have moments of boredom and social situations where you disagree that something is good, and not just to have everything so tailored to our taste.

Brian Lehrer: That's where you end the piece, right? Warning about pure optimization, aggregation, and specialization, as you put it. Where do you personally land right now? Are you pro-social media? We were just talking to Jimmy Wales, right? You can start Wikipedia. One of the things I love about Wikipedia is that everything has a footnote. Little article has 100 footnotes. You can click on that footnote, and it takes you to the original source, for people who are curious, but then you wind up warning about that kind of thing.

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, I think that we have too much optimization in general and that it makes us feel that we don't need the social aspects of life and the communal, in-person aspects of life if we can just skip it all, right? You hear people say, "Well, I just don't have to do X anymore," "I order all my groceries from Instacart. I don't even have to go to the grocery store anymore. It comes in 45 minutes. It's faster than me driving down there." I think a lot of that is happening with information-gathering all over, and maybe most intensely with information-gathering.

I do think it's kind of bad because I think that what happens is that you have a consensus that builds on these types of forums that try and optimize, whether it's Twitter. Twitter pushed all journalists towards one narrative, something that Jimmy Wales has talked convincingly about, and that social media made everyone think the same. It's supposed to be this democratizing force, but through the fact that it just filters out the most engaged with opinions, people start to only listen to those types of opinions. It's not like talking to four people in a cafe or something like that, where three of them might be totally different.

Brian Lehrer: We have to leave it with Jay Caspian Kang, staff writer for The New Yorker, where he writes the weekly column called Fault Lines. Jay, thanks a lot. We appreciate it.

Jay Caspian Kang: No, thank you.

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