Nguyen is hardly alone in this experience. BookTok, a vast informal literary community on TikTok, has inspired many people to read. outside of one's usual interests. You don't have to dig deep into X, Reddit or Instagram to find reading suggestions that would never appear on newspaper or magazine year-end lists or major annual awards lists. Little-known literary titles are reaching people they may not have reached before.
But if we take Nguyen's suggestion and conclude that some of us are looking at fewer bad books and getting to the ones we like more quickly, does that really mean an improved reading culture?
Let's put our hypothetical friend Dave, a military history buff, into a book club that requires him to read a whole bunch of books he's probably never picked up – most of which he considers pointless and a waste of his time. The club also provides a community of personal friends with whom one can argue, disagree, and even argue about which book should be next in line. Dave may not read many more books than he would have read without the club, and he may enjoy the ones he reads less; the quality of the information it receives may even deteriorate. He may find himself back on the same Reddit threads, looking for things that match his interests.
But reading together has social benefits. Perhaps someone can knock him out of his narrow circle of interests. The reading experience can benefit from the more complex mental environment that books create; the boredom and impatience that long texts sometimes cause can help push and push a person to think more than perfectly thought out things.
I asked Nguyen if she thought her vision of a more attuned and online reading public could eliminate the need for an in-person book club, literary society, or writing workshop. She said that while social media and online book learning are likely to speed up research, they can also, in her experience, limit people almost entirely to their own tastes. “You have the opportunity to create a more impenetrable filter bubble,” she said.
Social media does create a powerful consensus—on the Internet, everything tends to quickly gravitate toward the same light—and one could argue that a slower, more fragmented network of personal, localized argument may ultimately offer more intellectual diversity. When I asked Nguyen about this, she mentioned Women of Ninth Streeta group of abstract expressionist artists working in the post-war period, and her own repressed nostalgia for the idea of artists and writers meeting in physical spaces with the same goals. “It just inherently feels more vibrant if it's in a physical space than if you're doing Substack notes at the same time as all your friends are posting Substack notes,” she said. But she also noted that such movements tend to be very insider, and that many of the most successful writers on platforms like Substack are people who may not quite fit into the New York literary scene. This seems undeniably true to me. It might be great to go to the same bars, publish in the same small magazines, and look very seriously at the same works of art in the same galleries, but today such a life seems anachronistic and annoying.
In another note to writers, Nguyen states:
I've tried similar tactics in the past, especially when writing about specific topics like education policy or artificial intelligence. But what I actually found was not an increased understanding, but rather an increased emphasis on social media consensus, which was largely dictated by the people who posted the most on a given topic. Even in those moments when I wasn't directly tweeting about a tweet I saw, I still pointed to it. Writing in this form was more like sticking a comment bubble on a combined stream of news, social media posts, and assortment of video podcasts. Most experts—at least those who comment on the world in columns, newsletters, or podcasts—do this in one form or another. Taken together, such writing forms a “discourse.”
