This is for those who still struggle to find an ecosystem of satisfying content or information on social media.
I am talking about what is produced specifically for the web. And I am talking about what is native to the web. Above all, this is about their tension with books as a source of knowledge and learning.
The primary question that comes to mind is: why is it that one still finds more satisfactory, life-changing information in reading a set of books from different points if time (even centuries ago) than on the internet? This is particularly puzzling nowadays, where we are supposedly living in an age of unprecedented change in our ways of life. Shouldn’t information produced today, in the dominant media forms of our time, be more appropriate to providing the means for a satisfactory, dynamic, bountiful, peaceful life in the present context? Or at least address our current anxieties in daily life more pertinently than books written when many of the supposed sources of our malaise did not exist?
I believe books still hold the upper hand. They are a format honed for millennia. More generally speaking, books embody the tradition of writing on paper, compressing information into a thin stack of paper, bound within some protective cover. More than just objects, books demand a certain rigor. They are costly to produce and must meet standards of length and cohesion. They cannot merely contain five pages, and they require an overall completeness and depth in their content, as it develops from front to back.
The “battle” between books and internet content, especially social media content, need not be framed as one of winners and losers, with crusaders and devils on opposing sides. I get the impression that internet content, in its current form, is still in its infancy. The current worldwide predominance of TikTok is merely a milestone in the longuer durée, the arc of this new mode of communication, bond-making, of culture-building. It remains a raw and evolving medium. And perhaps might not bring the same kinds of answers that the sometimes uncomfortable, difficult, and sometimes glorious, plodding through a book offers. There is no shortage of arguments, evidence and research that is persuasive enough in suggesting that social media, in some ways, is eroding the quality of communication in its traditional sense, while fostering concerning trends through the incentives and values that its mechanisms (algorithm, user interface, UX, affordances) inherently perpetuate.
Yet, much like the book has matured through the centuries, from treatises, poems, illuminated manuscripts, to printed volumes (and the rise of literacy that came with it), scientific articles, e-books, and so on, social media will continue evolving into something of its own. And its potential benefits will be magnified by parties who care to shape it. TikTok could very well represent social media’s equivalent to a wax tablet stage in the development of book culture.
All this is to say that books occupy their own unique class of intellectual artefact, existing in a distinct domain from social media, both of which are subsumed into the broader realm of communication, the crystallisation of information, and culture-making. In this comparison, the idea of a ‘higher’ intellectual sphere reserved majoritarily for book-readers can be set aside.
Today, it might still hold true that one reads books at the expense of social media consumption to greater gratification and self-enrichment. Many will relate to the experience of having read a few ‘great’ books, which flips some switch in our heads that makes the majority of online content consumed thereafter seem too introductory, superficial, rehashed, narrow or repetitive. It is also true that models for constructing sustainability (for example financial) in this medium are still developing, particularly among independent creators that have honed tools and strategies over the past years to balance their interest for self-expression with the demands of social media1 and internet content creation more broadly.
Still, this could change in a near future, when social media reaches a new stage in its journey to maturity. In that future, one may still opt for books to occupy their time and attention, but it might become clearer why, in certain cases, social media is not only a complement, but a purposeful tool for engaging with knowledge, be it in its acquisition, refinement, search, recalibration, application, and many other actions for which words have yet to be coined.
Maybe only books can allow a reader to access a certain depth in thought, while learning to navigate the contents of the mind with ever-greater deftness and limberness. This is due to the unique relationship they demand, one that is both painstaking and immersive, a kind of trance-like engagement that allows the mind to absorb their contents fully. This kind of absorption, a slow, deliberate process, which keeps the mind in its toes, is something that internet content rarely calls for. It may be that this quality, the capacity to cultivate depth and sustained focus in a condensed, back and forth engagement of mind and content, remains the exclusive province of words. It is a place that the visual and audiovisual can never quite reach.
To consume online digital media today, especially in the dominant platforms and those that seek to innovate, is to witness a culture in the making. It is a culture of relating to one another, and of constructing identity in its early, unruly, fragile stages. It does not yet seem to be self-sustaining, nor capable of carrying forward the centuries-old continuity of thought that books uphold. Still, this may not be the measure of its potential. The path of its evolution does not need to be defined by what it cannot yet do compared to what exists.
- And the owners of the platforms have also responded to these demands in their development of new versions and services. ↩︎
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