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

“[O]nce a day, at least, I wonder what my life would be like if I smashed my phone into bits and never contacted AppleCare,” writes Jay Caspian Kang in his latest New Yorker column. Tellingly, he doesn’t wish for a specific intellectual glow-up in this hypothetical, just the sense of possibility. And he’s not alone. The cozy armchair, the writing desk, the law-library lamp casting a warm light over your longhand-written journal—all are part of the fantasy of a rich, phone-free life. But what if we’re getting as much, or more, from our prolific “online” reading as we would from the TBR pile of our dreams?

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.