essay on books better than social media

The Case for Paper: Books vs. E-Readers

Why a good old-fashioned book is better for your mental health..

Posted February 2, 2024 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

• Research suggests that comprehension is six to eight times better with physical books than e-readers.
• Physical books help readers absorb and recall content more effectively.
• Turning pages as we read creates an “index” in the brain, mapping what we read visually to a particular page.
• Research shows that, despite the prevalence of technology, most people still prefer print books to e-readers.

Screens are replacing paper when it comes to nearly every aspect of communication, but is it good for our mental health? Research proves the countless mental health benefits of reading , but still most people are choosing screen-time over picking up a book when it comes to entertainment.

Even in schools, gone are the days of buying those stretchy book covers for your heavy textbooks; digital modalities of learning are taking precedence, lightening backpacks but burdening young minds with the challenge of staying on-task in a sea of digital distractions. Reading short blurbs on social media as we scroll inhibits not only our attention span, making lengthy books more arduous for our dopamine -addicted brains to digest, but often waters down the language, using more informal, conversational-style writing that offers much less exposure to rich, brain-boosting vocabulary and concepts.

Research suggests that comprehension is six to eight times better with physical books than e-readers (Altamura, L., Vargas, C., & Salmerón, L., 2023). Though many people find they can read faster on a device, the distractions, like social media scrolling, advertisements, and email notifications, often hinder memory retention. Physical books provide an immersive experience, resulting in readers who absorb and recall the content more effectively.

Holding the weight of a book in your hand, turning the pages, and even highlighting your favorite passages are all experienced in the body. In fact, according to researchers, turning pages as we read creates an “index” in the brain, mapping what we read visually to a particular page, (Rothkopf, Ernst Z.,1971). This is part of what allows the brain to retain the information better when read from a physical book.

From the way you position your body when holding a book, to the way your head and eyes adjust to scan the pages as they turn, there are distinct differences in the way our bodies experience reading a good old-fashioned book. “Print books and the substrate of paper lend an obvious physicality to individual texts, while e-books are not tangible volumes and are differently touched, held, carried and navigated,” wrote Mangen, A., and van der Weel, A. in “The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: an integrative framework for reading research,” (2016, p. 116–124). “The haptic feedback of a touch screen is different from a paper book, and the implications of such interactions warrant empirical investigations. Studies in experimental psychology and neuroscience show that object manipulation provides spatial information which is crucial for building coherent mental representations of the manipulated object.”

In addition to improving comprehension and providing an immersive, embodied experience, reading physical books offers a uniquely social experience that e-readers miss out on. Whether you’re perusing the shelves at the bookstore, coffee in hand, asking your local librarian for recommendations from their collection, or passing along your copy of a favorite book to a friend, interacting with fellow book lovers is one of the aspects of reading that people most enjoy. Downloading books onto your e-reader bypasses these opportunities for connection.

Perhaps what is most salient is the undeniably strong preference most people have for reading printed books. In one study, 92 percent of students reportedly preferred print books over e-books (Baron, N. S., 2015). There’s something special about holding a book in your hand, admiring the cover art, even appreciating the way your bookmark visually advances with time spent turning the pages.

Altamura, L., Vargas, C., & Salmerón, L. (2023). Do New Forms of Reading Pay Off? A Meta-Analysis on the Relationship Between Leisure Digital Reading Habits and Text Comprehension. Review of Educational Research, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543231216463

Baron, N. S. (2015). Words onscreen: The fate of reading in a digital world. Oxford University Press.

Mangen, A., and van der Weel, A. (2016) The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: an integrative framework for reading research. Literacy, 50: 116–124. doi: 10.1111/lit.12086 .

Rothkopf, Ernst Z. (1971) Incidental memory for location of information in text. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Volume 10, Issue 6: Pages 608-613. ISSN 0022-5371, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(71)80066-X .

Heather Rose Artushin, LISW-CP, is a child and family therapist passionate about the power of reading.

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Why reading books is even more important in the digital age

The emergence of social media has affected, among other things, the idea of free time. Before, the absence of responsibilities such as schoolwork or household chores would give us the opportunity to enjoy activities like playing the guitar, sketching, baking, or painting. However, social media has given us access to endless amounts of videos, posts, memes, and other online interactions to effortlessly immerse ourselves in instead. 

In my case, social media prevented me from devoting more time to reading books — a hobby and passion of mine ever since I got my first book 13 years ago. My free time that used to be spent in between a paperback’s covers and following the adventures of a boy with a lightning-shaped scar or seeing the heroics of the son of a Sea God was replaced by a phone screen as I passively read through status updates, Tweets, comments, or watched the occasional random video. 

“Though it is good that social media enables us to do things simultaneously, such as reading through a post while private messaging a friend, certain situations call for us to be in the present. Reading and its linear process offered a nice break from the content-switching often done with social media.” 

Though I do not think it is bad to use these platforms and enjoy your interests, I disliked having my mind consumed by social media almost 24/7. I would be constantly bombarded with notifications, messages, and recommendations, making it harder to concentrate on a given task. Even when I was eating a meal and my phone was in another room, I could not focus on the food because my mind was thinking about this post I saw a few minutes ago on Facebook. 

 With all these distractions, I thought of returning to another form of content to spend my free time. In December 2019, ten years after my first paperback, I made an unofficial New Year’s resolution: I decided to cut back on social media and return to reading books.

After a couple of pages and a few uninstalled social media apps,  I finished reading seven novels four months into 2020. Distancing myself from social media enabled me to rekindle the fleeting passion from my childhood. Not only did I feel like my 11-year-old self, who was still trying to read a book despite a brownout, but after finishing my seventh novel, I realized the greater value of reading books amid this golden age of digital content.

Though it is good that social media enables us to do things simultaneously, such as reading through a post while private messaging a friend, certain situations call for us to be in the present. Reading and its linear process offered a nice break from the content-switching often done with social media.

When I reimmersed myself in books, this content-switching habit kept intruding on my train of thought, and it was challenging to read through an entire page, let alone a paragraph. Our digital lifestyles over the decade have reduced the average attention span of a human from twelve seconds to just eight seconds based on a Microsoft survey; a goldfish with its nine-second attention span could hold a thought longer than the modern-day Juan. As I ponder on this, I was shamefully reminded of how often I stopped writing this piece mid-sentence and impulsively jumped on the Reddit tab.

I did eventually overcome this reading hurdle as reading itself improves concentration because it trains and demands the mind to drown out mental intrusions to focus on the content at hand. Each book was easier to digest than the last because I could get lost in the pages. This less-fidgety attention span also proved helpful come night time.

Falling asleep the moment I lie down was difficult because my mind would still be racing with thoughts. Other factors such as academics also prevented me from properly establishing a consistent bedtime routine. This is why I, and even others, resorted to social media to bridge the gap between lying down and sleeping. However, it just results in this frustrating state where the eyes are tired from the screen but the mind is still processing all these thoughts that social media fuels even more. Fortunately, reading books offered me a way to alleviate these concerns and achieve our sleepless generation’s long-sought consistent body clock. 

In a study by the University of Sussex, reading worked best at reducing stress among the participants compared to other methods. Through reading, it helps a person be more relaxed and calmer.  In my experience, I have noticed how my sleep schedule and sleep quality drastically improved as I continued to read more books. This is in stark contrast to some of my friends who have shared their frustrations with their body clocks. Of course, I know that other factors also play a role in one’s sleep schedule such as work and responsibilities but it is still good to know that there is a way to address our generation’s sleep depravity.   

Going further on the benefits of reading books, in this era where information is peeking from every digital corner, the distinction between fact and fiction can become blurry . But with reading helping us improve our comprehension, sorting through the overwhelming content can be easier.

“In school, reading a book is often presented as an academic activity where we need to remember dates, names, or events. We are taught to extract something from the text to create an analysis or to answer a question. While there is merit to them and they are important to do, at the heart of reading is the experience.”

A study from Emory University saw brain scans of students have an increase in the brain areas involved in receptive language days after reading the study’s selected book. Furthermore, as an active form of entertainment, reading books exposes you to arguments and perceptions about the world which gives new lenses to view things. These help you pull from different things you’ve read about and relate them with the information and the context you have now and decide whether it’s to be trusted or questioned.

 Above all of this though, the best part of reading books is the immersion factor. I think what our education system has not been able to deliver is the empathy-driven ride of reading. In school, reading a book is often presented as an academic activity where we need to remember dates, names, or events. We are taught to extract something from the text to create an analysis or to answer a question. While there is merit to them and they are important to do, at the heart of reading is the experience. It’s about getting lost in the pages and empathizing with the characters whether in sorrow or happiness. 

During my 2020 reading spree, I saw the world from multiple perspectives. I saw it as a Northern Lord solving a royal mystery, as an Indian boy stranded on a boat with a Tiger, as an Afghan man facing the demons of his past and so much more. I was able to understand and feel their struggles and triumphs. Not only was it an eye-opener for situations completely different from my own, but it taught me lessons and made me ponder all while looking at words on a paper. It’s an experience I rarely get from scrolling through Facebook. 

My sentiments are not a slight against social media and its users. Social media is not inherently bad as it can actually help us dive deeper into interests and is a convenient tool for communication, especially during a pandemic. In fact, I missed claiming my senior high diploma because I failed to answer a Google form when I uninstalled the Messenger app.  

Nor am I also saying that a person who reads books is automatically better than someone who doesn’t. Rather, nothing will be lost if we devote even five minutes of our time to reading a book, and in those five minutes, you’ll gain back more things than the time you spent. It’s why I always perk up whenever a friend says they want to try to read or are asking for a book recommendation.  It’s something I believe everyone should be doing. 

So the next time you have some free time and you get the urge to pick up your phone to scroll through social media, try picking up a book and read instead. It won’t be as easy as going through your feed and there will be that incessant tug of taking your eyes off the page to reach for your phone, but the effort will be worth doing because beyond those words and pages, is a soul-sustaining world far more real that can not be replaced by any digital space. 

2 thoughts on “ Why reading books is even more important in the digital age ”

A very well written article Yuan. Although there are many distractions in every day life. Never lose your passion for reading. Social media may catch our interest. But reading reaches into our soul.

Well written Yuan. Keep writing and keep reading. Books are a window to our world as well as our inner self.

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The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens

E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such technologies improve, but research suggests that reading on paper still boasts unique advantages

By Ferris Jabr

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In a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad's touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine—or so a title card would have us believe. The girl's father, Jean-Louis Constanza , presents "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" as naturalistic observation—a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment—that reveals a generational transition. "Technology codes our minds," he writes in the video's description. "Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives"—that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age. Perhaps his daughter really did expect the paper magazines to respond the same way an iPad would. Or maybe she had no expectations at all—maybe she just wanted to touch the magazines. Babies touch everything . Young children who have never seen a tablet like the iPad or an e-reader like the Kindle will still reach out and run their fingers across the pages of a paper book; they will jab at an illustration they like; heck, they will even taste the corner of a book. Today's so-called digital natives still interact with a mix of paper magazines and books, as well as tablets, smartphones and e-readers; using one kind of technology does not preclude them from understanding another. Nevertheless, the video brings into focus an important question: How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest among us , but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone who routinely switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who have already vowed to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin? Since at least the 1980s researchers in many different fields—including psychology, computer engineering, and library and information science—have investigated such questions in more than one hundred published studies. The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s , however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales. Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments , polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

"There is physicality in reading," says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, "maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new." Navigating textual landscapes Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language. We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid , we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision. Some of these repurposed brain regions are specialized for object recognition —they are networks of neurons that help us instantly distinguish an apple from an orange, for example, yet classify both as fruit. Just as we learn that certain features—roundness, a twiggy stem, smooth skin—characterize an apple, we learn to recognize each letter by its particular arrangement of lines, curves and hollow spaces. Some of the earliest forms of writing, such as Sumerian cuneiform , began as characters shaped like the objects they represented —a person's head, an ear of barley, a fish. Some researchers see traces of these origins in modern alphabets: C as crescent moon, S as snake. Especially intricate characters—such as Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji —activate motor regions in the brain involved in forming those characters on paper: The brain literally goes through the motions of writing when reading, even if the hands are empty. Researchers recently discovered that the same thing happens in a milder way when some people read cursive. Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies , people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters. In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text. In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. As an analogy, imagine if Google Maps allowed people to navigate street by individual street, as well as to teleport to any specific address, but prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country. Although e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad re-create pagination—sometimes complete with page numbers, headers and illustrations—the screen only displays a single virtual page: it is there and then it is gone. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies ahead. "The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office . "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book." At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension. In a study published in January 2013 Anne Mangen of the University of Stavanger in Norway and her colleagues asked 72 10th-grade students of similar reading ability to study one narrative and one expository text, each about 1,500 words in length. Half the students read the texts on paper and half read them in pdf files on computers with 15-inch liquid-crystal display (LCD) monitors. Afterward, students completed reading-comprehension tests consisting of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, during which they had access to the texts. Students who read the texts on computers performed a little worse than students who read on paper. Based on observations during the study, Mangen thinks that students reading pdf files had a more difficult time finding particular information when referencing the texts. Volunteers on computers could only scroll or click through the pdfs one section at a time, whereas students reading on paper could hold the text in its entirety in their hands and quickly switch between different pages. Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says. Supporting this research, surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control. People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose. Because of these preferences—and because getting away from multipurpose screens improves concentration—people consistently say that when they really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper. In a 2011 survey of graduate students at National Taiwan University, the majority reported browsing a few paragraphs online before printing out the whole text for more in-depth reading. A 2008 survey of millennials (people born between 1980 and the early 2000s) at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island concluded that, "when it comes to reading a book, even they prefer good, old-fashioned print". And in a 2003 study conducted at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, nearly 80 percent of 687 surveyed students preferred to read text on paper as opposed to on a screen in order to "understand it with clarity". Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume. Text on a computer, an e-reader and—somewhat ironically—on any touch-screen device is far more intangible than text on paper. Whereas a paper book is made from pages of printed letters fixed in a particular arrangement, the text that appears on a screen is not part of the device's hardware—it is an ephemeral image. When reading a paper book, one can feel the paper and ink and smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the pages make a distinctive sound when turned; and underlining or highlighting a sentence with ink permanently alters the paper's chemistry. So far, digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated this kind of tactility (although some companies are innovating, at least with keyboards ). Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape and weight. We might refer to a hardcover edition of War and Peace as a hefty tome or a paperback Heart of Darkness as a slim volume. In contrast, although a digital text has a length—which is sometimes represented with a scroll or progress bar—it has no obvious shape or thickness. An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough " haptic dissonance " to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books. Exhaustive reading Although many old and recent studies conclude that people understand what they read on paper more thoroughly than what they read on screens, the differences are often small. Some experiments, however, suggest that researchers should look not just at immediate reading comprehension, but also at long-term memory. In a 2003 study Kate Garland of the University of Leicester and her colleagues asked 50 British college students to read study material from an introductory economics course either on a computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After 20 minutes of reading Garland and her colleagues quizzed the students with multiple-choice questions. Students scored equally well regardless of the medium, but differed in how they remembered the information. Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which is to recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as where, when and how one learned it—and knowing something, which is feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the information. Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable, long-term memory that is "known" from then on. When taking the quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their minds for information from the text, trying to trigger the right memory—they often just knew the answers. Other researchers have suggested that people comprehend less when they read on a screen because screen-based reading is more physically and mentally taxing than reading on paper. E-ink is easy on the eyes because it reflects ambient light just like a paper book, but computer screens, smartphones and tablets like the iPad shine light directly into people's faces. Depending on the model of the device, glare, pixilation and flickers can also tire the eyes. LCDs are certainly gentler on eyes than their predecessor, cathode-ray tubes (CRT), but prolonged reading on glossy self-illuminated screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision. Such symptoms are so common among people who read on screens—affecting around 70 percent of people who work long hours in front of computers—that the American Optometric Association officially recognizes computer vision syndrome . Erik Wästlund of Karlstad University in Sweden has conducted some particularly rigorous research on whether paper or screens demand more physical and cognitive resources. In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper. In another set of experiments 82 volunteers completed the READ test on computers, either as a paginated document or as a continuous piece of text. Afterward researchers assessed the students' attention and working memory, which is a collection of mental talents that allow people to temporarily store and manipulate information in their minds. Volunteers had to quickly close a series of pop-up windows, for example, sort virtual cards or remember digits that flashed on a screen. Like many cognitive abilities, working memory is a finite resource that diminishes with exertion. Although people in both groups performed equally well on the READ test, those who had to scroll through the continuous text did not do as well on the attention and working-memory tests. Wästlund thinks that scrolling—which requires a reader to consciously focus on both the text and how they are moving it—drains more mental resources than turning or clicking a page, which are simpler and more automatic gestures. A 2004 study conducted at the University of Central Florida reached similar conclusions. Attitude adjustments An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that in addition to screens possibly taxing people's attention more than paper, people do not always bring as much mental effort to screens in the first place. Subconsciously, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than reading on paper. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113 people in northern California, Ziming Liu of San Jose State University concluded that people reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper, and are more likely to read a document once, and only once. When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way. In a 2011 experiment at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, college students took multiple-choice exams about expository texts either on computers or on paper. Researchers limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes of study time; the other half could review the text for as long as they liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using computers and paper performed equally well. When managing their own study time, however, volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points higher. Presumably, students using paper approached the exam with a more studious frame of mind than their screen-reading peers, and more effectively directed their attention and working memory. Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do. Books on the Kindle can only be loaned once , for example. To date, many engineers, designers and user-interface experts have worked hard to make reading on an e-reader or tablet as close to reading on paper as possible. E-ink resembles chemical ink and the simple layout of the Kindle's screen looks like a page in a paperback. Likewise, Apple's iBooks attempts to simulate the overall aesthetic of paper books, including somewhat realistic page-turning. Jaejeung Kim of KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence in South Korea and his colleagues have designed an innovative and unreleased interface that makes iBooks seem primitive. When using their interface, one can see the many individual pages one has read on the left side of the tablet and all the unread pages on the right side, as if holding a paperback in one's hands. A reader can also flip bundles of pages at a time with a flick of a finger. But why, one could ask, are we working so hard to make reading with new technologies like tablets and e-readers so similar to the experience of reading on the very ancient technology that is paper? Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick , but the New York Times , Washington Post , ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way. Some Web comics and infographics turn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness. Similarly, Robin Sloan has pioneered the tap essay for mobile devices. The immensely popular interactive Scale of the Universe tool could not have been made on paper in any practical way. New e-publishing companies like Atavist offer tablet readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next. When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But text is not the only way to read.

Students learn better from books than screens, according to a new study

Limiting students to a purely digital world may not be helping all students to learn effectively. Image:  REUTERS/Michael Kooren

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Patricia A. Alexander

Lauren m. singer.

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Stay up to date:, youth perspectives.

Today’s students see themselves as digital natives , the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers.

Teachers, parents and policymakers certainly acknowledge the growing influence of technology and have responded in kind. We’ve seen more investment in classroom technologies , with students now equipped with school-issued iPads and access to e-textbooks. In 2009 , California passed a law requiring that all college textbooks be available in electronic form by 2020; in 2011 , Florida lawmakers passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.

Given this trend, teachers, students, parents and policymakers might assume that students’ familiarity and preference for technology translates into better learning outcomes. But we’ve found that’s not necessarily true.

As researchers in learning and text comprehension, our recent work has focused on the differences between reading print and digital media. While new forms of classroom technology like digital textbooks are more accessible and portable, it would be wrong to assume that students will automatically be better served by digital reading simply because they prefer it.

Speed – at a cost

Our work has revealed a significant discrepancy. Students said they preferred and performed better when reading on screens. But their actual performance tended to suffer.

For example, from our review of research done since 1992 , we found that students were able to better comprehend information in print for texts that were more than a page in length. This appears to be related to the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension. We were also surprised to learn that few researchers tested different levels of comprehension or documented reading time in their studies of printed and digital texts.

To explore these patterns further, we conducted three studies that explored college students’ ability to comprehend information on paper and from screens.

Students first rated their medium preferences. After reading two passages, one online and one in print, these students then completed three tasks: Describe the main idea of the texts, list key points covered in the readings and provide any other relevant content they could recall. When they were done, we asked them to judge their comprehension performance.

Across the studies, the texts differed in length, and we collected varying data (e.g., reading time). Nonetheless, some key findings emerged that shed new light on the differences between reading printed and digital content:

Students overwhelming preferred to read digitally.

Reading was significantly faster online than in print.

Students judged their comprehension as better online than in print.

Paradoxically, overall comprehension was better for print versus digital reading.

The medium didn’t matter for general questions (like understanding the main idea of the text).

But when it came to specific questions, comprehension was significantly better when participants read printed texts.

Placing print in perspective

From these findings, there are some lessons that can be conveyed to policymakers, teachers, parents and students about print’s place in an increasingly digital world.

1. Consider the purpose

We all read for many reasons. Sometimes we’re looking for an answer to a very specific question. Other times, we want to browse a newspaper for today’s headlines.

As we’re about to pick up an article or text in a printed or digital format, we should keep in mind why we’re reading. There’s likely to be a difference in which medium works best for which purpose.

In other words, there’s no “one medium fits all” approach.

2. Analyze the task

One of the most consistent findings from our research is that, for some tasks, medium doesn’t seem to matter. If all students are being asked to do is to understand and remember the big idea or gist of what they’re reading, there’s no benefit in selecting one medium over another .

But when the reading assignment demands more engagement or deeper comprehension, students may be better off reading print . Teachers could make students aware that their ability to comprehend the assignment may be influenced by the medium they choose. This awareness could lessen the discrepancy we witnessed in students’ judgments of their performance vis-à-vis how they actually performed.

3. Slow it down

In our third experiment, we were able to create meaningful profiles of college students based on the way they read and comprehended from printed and digital texts.

Among those profiles, we found a select group of undergraduates who actually comprehended better when they moved from print to digital. What distinguished this atypical group was that they actually read slower when the text was on the computer than when it was in a book. In other words, they didn’t take the ease of engaging with the digital text for granted. Using this select group as a model, students could possibly be taught or directed to fight the tendency to glide through online texts.

4. Something that can’t be measured

There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there’s clearly something important that would be lost with print’s demise.

In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text etched with questions or reflections. It’s difficult to imagine a similar level of engagement with a digital text. There should probably always be a place for print in students’ academic lives – no matter how technologically savvy they become.

Of course, we realize that the march toward online reading will continue unabated. And we don’t want to downplay the many conveniences of online texts, which include breadth and speed of access.

Rather, our goal is simply to remind today’s digital natives – and those who shape their educational experiences – that there are significant costs and consequences to discounting the printed word’s value for learning and academic development.

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Books are still the best media. Here’s why.

The hardcovered book is the king of media. It is user-friendly, available to all, and full of content that can be found online. They do not require Wi-Fi or internet access. They do not cause any blue-light sensitivity problems. They come in normal print, large print or and braille. Books are not just a resource; they are our friends when we’re in dark places, rescuing us from our circumstances, and giving us ideas to think about in various times in our lives. In short, physical books are the gift of media that the electronic age has failed to render obsolete.

Books are, comparatively speaking, timeless. Their information is just as effective and important today as it was twenty years ago. The internet is always changing, and the newsreels are focused only on the immediate dissemination of “what’s hot” that day.

Books have stood the test of time, too. The electronic era wasn’t created until the 20th century, when room-sized computers were introduced. What could be considered books have been around since the Egyptians, according to a “History of Books” by Cerrie Burnell at Booktrust.org.

Until recently, books were luxuries that few could afford, much less read. Books were, in a sense, as royal as those who could access them. Books were hand-written and hand-copied for centuries, until the Gutenberg printing press began to mass-produce written works. Not just ordinary books, but the Book—the Holy Bible. Reformers like Martin Luther and William Tyndale employed the printing press to distribute copies of the Scriptures in their common languages.

As if history had not proven the importance of books, both the modern and post-modern eras have heavily relied on physical books. For instance, many schools until the 21st century still based their curriculums on printed textbooks. Standardized tests, such as the PSAT, SAT and ACT are often testing knowledge of literature. Libraries, despite incorporating technological advances, still find their shelves full of books rather than Kindles and subscription services.

While television, movies, or internet are not inherently evil, people must learn to navigate through the distractions of advertisements, hackers and broken website links to reach the content. When they finally find something good to peruse, it robs them of the creativity of their imagination. Even for a person like me, who has strict limitations as to what she reads, can occasionally find a book that captivates the heart and moves the soul.

Books have made a recent comeback in the current young adult populace. The most famous of series, many of which have been made into movies, include The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Divergent, and The Maze Runner. The modern debate over “book versus movie” would not exist if the books were never read. In fact, the movies might not have been made at all if there had been no book behind them! Therefore, books help the movie industry, rather than hinder it.

Books can be read all over the world. They are just as portable as electronic devices but require only one electric outlet: the reader’s brain. Unlike electronics, which are cluttered with advertisements that distract and disgust many viewers, hard copy books draw the reader’s attention directly to the message, world or information it presents. This immersion takes more time than a catchy news package or an engrossing film; yet, the immersion is complete and more user-friendly than what is blasted across the screens. The book asks the reader to participate with the story; in mere words and pages, books create so much from the individual’s mind that the electronic media viewer is robbed of making for themselves.

Children, if given the right level and topic of books, are not likely to find anything beyond what they should know of the world. Sadly, the internet and television can alter that safeguard which parents instill in their households. Books are more child-friendly than most electronic media. While children should learn the wonders of computers and television, they ought to also experience the wonders and joys of absorbing clean material, free of distraction.

Today’s children are free to pursue the acquisition of knowledge and world-building that several generations ago would have only dreamed about. Our generation has been blessed by God to have books all around us. We take them for granted and rob ourselves of that gift which all of human history has desired to obtain: free knowledge of literature, science and art. From the Library of Congress, to the local library, to the local bookstore, humans have billions of opportunities to select something that will inspire and engage them with the world around them. Humanity will never outgrow its need to entertain themselves; hard copy books are the most worldwide, multilingual, subject-specific, age-appropriate, self-serving, portable, and uninhibited form of media the world has ever possessed.

I understand that the electronic era has proposed a compromise between hard copy books and the internet, known as e-Books. On the outset, e-Books seem fair, but they are rarely free. Either an individual purchase or a purchase of a subscription service is usually required to read on an electronic device. Some electronic devices were made with the specific intent of being used for reading e-Books. This expense is not worth the convenience. For people who prefer to own things, to have them in their hands, and truly know that their property is theirs, hard copy books are still the ideal solution.

Drawing an old, yellow-tinged, hard-backed capsule of knowledge from the library’s vast and silent brain is a miracle that most people had no access to. With more knowledge and literacy than most eras have ever had, it is a wonder how modern generations run to their convenient and all-purpose electronics. I am guilty of this, but I am going to try my best to select Narnia over the latest TikTok compilation on YouTube. I want the joy that people before me had striven to give themselves and their posterity: I want a hard-copy book.

People might be surprised to hear that I want to be a filmmaker someday. I do not believe the film industry to be better than the publishing industry. Yet, I sense a different amount of poison that needs to be removed from both industries. There are books that I love and would consider turning into films because of the rich and profound impact they had on me during my development. My opinions regarding what I plan to do later in my life do not compromise the opinion I hold regarding the books that surround me. If it wasn’t for the knowledge I gained from the books my family and I would read, I would not have such a vibrant imagination or storytelling dream. The story—whether book or film—must be told. I am meeting modern families where they will look for good stories. Yet, if they ask me where to find an amazing story to read, I have more than a few series in mind.

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Watch CBS News

Books vs. e-books: The science behind the best way to read

By Amy Kraft

December 14, 2015 / 6:00 AM EST / CBS News

While browsing the bookstore to buy a gift for that special someone (or yourself), you may be faced with a tough decision: e-books or the old-fashioned kind? Each one has its pros and cons, and choosing the best option depends on a number of factors.

Some of the practical advantages of going digital are obvious: A portable little e-reader can carry an entire library wherever you go, which is great for travelers or those who always want a choice of reading material.

On the other hand, research has been stacking up to show that reading on paper has a number of benefits, too. Plus, there's the nostalgia factor .

"First and foremost, consider the person and their lifelong preferences," Dr. Matthew H. Schneps, director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning, a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Boston and MIT, told CBS News in an email. "Some people absolutely love the look, smell, and feel of the classical book held in the hand, and such people may not want to give up the sensory experience of reading from a paper book. If the recipient of your gift is someone who is adventurous when it comes to gadgets, but otherwise doesn't read much using traditional books, giving the gift of an e-reader can be a life-changing experience for them."

Here's a look at some of the science to consider before you spring for a Kindle, a Nook or a stack of new hardcovers.

Young, reluctant readers prefer e-readers

A 2014 study published in the journal Library & Information Science Research found that out of 143 10th grade students, most preferred e-readers . Boys and those who did not care much for reading also shared a strong preference for e-readers.

"An e-reader has more in common with the electronic devices that young people use all the time, like smartphones or iPads, than a paper book, when it comes to turning of pages, the possibilities of adjusting font size, etc.," lead author of the study, Åse Kristine Tveit, told CBS News in an email.

Reading on paper may boost retention

Several small studies suggest that reading on paper instead of an electronic screen is better for memory retention and focus. The Guardian reported on an experiment from Norway where people were given a short story to read either on a Kindle or in a paperback book; when they were quizzed later, those who read the paperback were more likely to remember plot points in the right order.

"When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right," the lead researcher, Anne Mangen, of Norway's Stavanger University, told the Guardian. "You have the tactile sense of progress ... Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story."

Paper suits readers with sleep problems and eye strain

High levels of screen luminance from an electronic device can contribute to visual fatigue, a condition marked by tired, itching, burning eyes.

There are also potential considerations for those reading e-books on light-emitting e-readers at night (although a number of e-readers do not use light-emitting screens), Dr. Margaret K. Merga, a reading and education specialist in Australia, told CBS News in an email. "Artificial light exposure from light-emitting e-readers may interfere with users' ability to sleep , ultimately leading to adverse impacts on health."

A 2014 study published in the journal PNAS found that reading an e-book before bedtime decreased the production of melatonin, a hormone that preps the body for sleep. E-books also impaired alertness the following day.

E-books help the visually impaired

Individuals with poor eyesight or reading disorders like dyslexia can benefit more from e-books because they provide a range of options for changing the text size and spacing of lines. A 2013 study in the journal PLOS One observed reading comprehension and speed in 103 high school students with dyslexia. The study found that people with dyslexia read more effectively, and with greater ease, when using the e-reader compared with reading on paper.

Schneps, who was the lead author on the paper, said, "What made the difference was the ability of the device to display lines of text that were extremely short (about two or three words per line), as well as its ability to space out the text. When these people read using the modified formatting, their reading instantly improved."

His team has a website where people can preview the effects of some of these features before making a purchase. Try out the interactive tips at readeasy.labvislearn.org .

A fondness for books

Many book-lovers still prefer the traditional option and value the tactile sensation of a bound paper book. "Paper books are, as a rule, very well designed, they look and smell good, and they carry with them a more human touch," Tveit said.

In Merga's experience with students in Australia, avid readers also tend to prefer reading on paper. While conducting the West Australian Study in Adolescent Book Reading (WASABR), Merga and colleagues found that students preferred reading paper books. "One student described this attitude as a preference to 'own something (rather) than just use it,'" Merga said.

More from CBS News

Impact of social media on the popularity of book reading

Introduction.

Social media giants such as Instagram and Facebook are the most lucrative marketing platforms thanks to the strength and range of their influence on the global population. Billions of people around the world turn to social media to discover what’s new and trendy. If someone wishes to spread an idea, social media would be the most lucrative channel for such an endeavor. However, is this vibrant and extensive market only valuable for commerce or does it also have a strong cultural influence?

We did some research online and came up with some interesting patterns that emerge when a certain book gets a large portion of social media attention . What type of influence do powerhouses have on the overall popularity of book reading among their users?

Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/bench-fashion-people-woman-4590202/

Fahrenheit 451 as a classic literature evergreen masterpiece

Ray Bradbury’s legendary novel was a real comet strike on the literary society of that time. The book received positive critics with more than a few of them concluding that the futuristic society described by the author represents a strong metaphor of their time. However, what gives this story an evergreen value is that each new generation could find similarities with their social reality. There are excellent platforms with relevant sources for an essay about Fahrenheit 451 from every decade in the last 70 that contain valid argumentation that the world where freedom is being oppressed is similar to the world the authors of those essays were living in.

When HBO released the movie based on Bradbury’s novel, social media was flooded with content that tried to compare the book to the movie. It was interesting that this discussion was played out on social media that goes to show how things aren’t so grey since the advent of the internet. Many people first learned about the book only because the movie was featured on a popular cable network with strong social media influence.

Social media makes research much easier

In a recent study on the effects of social media on reading habits among students, it was revealed that 12.7 percent of those who were interviewed read to gain more knowledge. However, what’s more important is that it also showed how most students say that Facebook and other platforms serve as a good place to find and exchange reading material. It’s also a good way to get connected to people who can help you with information on the type of literature you’re interested in.

Digital platforms are the libraries of today and those that know where and how to look always have the chance to enjoy the full benefits of social media in their research for books they wish to read. Considering the expansion of digital books, it’s understandable why people go online to get the book they like. Therefore, instead of thinking that social media separates readers from physical books, we should consider they’re also getting them closer to digital versions of any piece of literature there is available.

Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/selective-focus-photography-of-woman-holding-book-373465/

The negative aspect of social media on youth literacy

Among numerous benefits of social media, there are some downsides and one of those is that they create a distraction from reading and even homework. If the trend continues there is a long-term risk of degradation of literacy among young students. Just as described in many Fahrenheit 451 essay examples from college students for decades now, television as a paradigm for social media is feeding too much information so their value has decreased. People are taking in too much content online so instead of focusing on facts and actual knowledge they are busy processing invaluable information.

What’s even worst is that social media platforms are also a spawning ground of disinformation, ranging from political campaigns to current healthcare topics. Artificial Intelligence algorithms that these services use increase the flow of false information by recognizing our interest in such topics, so the more a person goes down the rabbit hole the more similar content algorithm feeds to a user’s home page.

Arena for public debate

Thanks to Facebook groups and comment sections on different content that appears on social media, users now how the chance to share their opinion and learn from people from all over the world. This gives passionate readers a wide array of possibilities to be creative and share views on different topics, including literature. There are groups dedicated to certain authors, where those who respect their work exchange all sorts of information, discuss different ideas or share their work if they wish to know what people think about it.

Whenever a popular book author would announce a new release, the social media would be all over all sorts of speculations and predictions, and the public interest in the author’s previous work would increase every time. On YouTube and Instagram, some content makers dedicate their content to literature; they share book reviews and suggest interesting titles to their followers.

The contribution of social media on reading during the COVID-19 global lockdown

During the COVID-19 lockdown, social media took a key role in the preservation of literary and many other cultural activities. Italian tenor legend Andrea Bocelli performed live on YouTube for the whole world since there were no public events allowed anywhere and the world needed music to heal. For those who stayed at home with more time on their hands and nowhere to go, social networks allowed communication and relief from the grim stories shared through all channels and technologies.

In the UK, Guardian released an article stating that the rate of people reading regularly has almost doubled up during the 2020 lockdown. What’s even more interesting is that the public was mostly interested in thrillers and crime novels during the lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Social media dictate much of the public awareness and general opinion on almost any topic, including literature. Our reading habits change because of our access to Facebook and Instagram. However, these apps can also become a distraction from more than just reading, so we should always use these services with caution. Social media has so much to offer to the book-reading audience, it would be a waste not to use its full potential to popularize reading among all generations.

Author Bio:

James Collins is a freelance content writer engaged with several college writing services. As a writer, James aims to deliver informational pieces that offer practical value to his audience. James’ work is based on deep research and the use of authentic data.

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Are you on social media a lot? When is the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?

If so, you are not alone — which is the point, of course. Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.

“Human brains have essentially evolved because of sociality more than any other thing,” says Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and expert in information technology and marketing. “When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.”

The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. But by 2017, 80 percent of American adults used Facebook alone. About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

As social media platforms have grown, though, the once-prevalent, gauzy utopian vision of online community has disappeared. Along with the benefits of easy connectivity and increased information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

“Social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Now Aral has written a book about it. In “The Hype Machine,” published this month by Currency, a Random House imprint, Aral details why social media platforms have become so successful yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.

As Aral notes, the book covers some of the same territory as “The Social Dilemma,” a documentary that is one of the most popular films on Netflix at the moment. But Aral’s book, as he puts it, "starts where ‘The Social Dilemma’ leaves off and goes one step further to ask: What can we do about it?”

“This machine exists in every facet of our lives,” Aral says. “And the question in the book is, what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the peril? We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.”

When “engagement” equals anger

“The Hype Machine” draws on Aral’s own research about social networks, as well as other findings, from the cognitive sciences, computer science, business, politics, and more. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, have found that people obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT PhD student and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networking for 20 years. The three researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

In this light, the essential tension surrounding social media companies is that their platforms gain audiences and revenue when posts provoke strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.

“This is a well-designed, well-thought-out machine that has objectives it maximizes,” Aral says. “The business models that run the social-media industrial complex have a lot to do with the outcomes we’re seeing — it’s an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favors] anger and salacious content.”

From Russia to marketing

“The Hype Machine” explores both the political implications and business dimensions of social media in depth. Certainly social media is fertile terrain for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia spread  false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and another 20 million people on Insta­gram (which Facebook owns), and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of adult Americans visited a false news source in the final weeks of the campaign.

“I think we need to be a lot more vigilant than we are,” says Aral.

We do not know if Russia’s efforts altered the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, though they may have been fairly effective. Curiously, it is not clear if the same is true of most U.S. corporate engagement efforts.

As Aral examines, digital advertising on most big U.S. online platforms is often wildly ineffective, with academic studies showing that the “lift” generated by ad campaigns — the extent to which they affect consumer action — has been overstated by a factor of hundreds, in some cases. Simply counting clicks on ads is not enough. Instead, online engagement tends to be more effective among new consumers, and when it is targeted well; in that sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerilla social media campaigns.

“The two questions I get asked the most these days,” Aral says, “are, one, did Russia succeed in intervening in our democracy? And two, how do I measure the ROI [return on investment] from marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized the answer to those two questions is the same.”

Ideas for improvement

“The Hype Machine” has received praise from many commentators. Foster Provost, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says it is a “masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy.” Duncan Watts, a university professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.”

In that vein, “The Hype Machine” has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral favors automated and user-generated labeling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. He also calls for firms to help scholars better research the issue of election interference.

Aral believes federal privacy measures could be useful, if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that lets consumers stop some data-sharing and allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them. He does not endorse breaking up Facebook, and suggests instead that the social media economy needs structural reform. He calls for data portability and interoperability, so “consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another.” Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, propelled by the network effects that drive the social-media economy.

“I do not advocate any one silver bullet,” says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas together — money, code, norms, and laws — can alter the trajectory of the social media industry.

But if things continue without change, Aral adds, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic backlash and user burnout.

“If you get me angry and riled up, I might click more in the short term, but I might also grow really tired and annoyed by how this is making my life miserable, and I might turn you off entirely,” Aral observes. “I mean, that’s why we have a Delete Facebook movement, that’s why we have a Stop Hate for Profit movement. People are pushing back against the short-term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.”

Changing the social media giants can seem like a tall order. Still, Aral says, these firms are not necessarily destined for domination.

“I don’t think this technology or any other technology has some deterministic endpoint,” Aral says. “I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we are abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad. That is the path I try to illuminate in this book.”

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Press mentions.

Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired . Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Danny Crichton of TechCrunch about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the future of social media. Aral notes that he believes a starting point “for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy.” 

New York Times

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger about how social media platforms can reduce the spread of misinformation. “Human-in-the-loop moderation is the right solution,” says Aral. “It’s not a simple silver bullet, but it would give accountability where these companies have in the past blamed software.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about his research examining the impact of social media on everything from business re-openings during the Covid-19 pandemic to politics.

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with NPR’s Michael Martin about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” says Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”

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How Children Read Differently From Books vs. Screens

Scrolling may work for social media, but experts say that for school assignments, kids learn better if they slow down their reading.

By Perri Klass, M.D.

In this pandemic year, parents have been watching — often anxiously — their children’s increasing reliance on screens for every aspect of their education. It can feel as if there’s no turning back to the time when learning involved hitting the actual books.

But the format children read in can make a difference in terms of how they absorb information.

Naomi Baron, who is professor emerita of linguistics at American University and author of a new book, “ How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen and Audio ,” said, “there are two components, the physical medium and the mind-set we bring to reading on that medium — and everything else sort of follows from that.”

Because we use screens for social purposes and for amusement, we all — adults and children — get used to absorbing online material, much of which was designed to be read quickly and casually, without much effort. And then we tend to use that same approach to on-screen reading with harder material that we need to learn from, to slow down with, to absorb more carefully. A result can be that we don’t give that material the right kind of attention.

For early readers

With younger children, Professor Baron said, it makes sense to stick with print to the extent that it is possible. (Full disclosure: As the national medical director of the program Reach Out and Read, I believe fervently in the value of reading print books to young children.) Print, she said, makes it easier for parents and children to interact with language, questions and answers, what is called “dialogic reading.” Further, many apps and e-books have too many distractions.

Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician who is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Michigan Medicine C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, said that apps designed to teach reading in the early years of school rely on “gamification meant to keep children engaged.” And though they do successfully teach core skills, she said, “what has been missing in remote schooling is the classroom context, the teacher as meaning maker, to tie it all together, helping it be more meaningful to you, not just a bunch of curricular components you’ve mastered.”

Any time that parents are able to engage with family reading time is good, using whatever medium works best for them, said Dr. Tiffany Munzer, also a developmental behavioral pediatrician at Mott Children’s Hospital, who has studied how young children use e-books. However, Dr. Munzer was the lead author on a 2019 study that found that parents and toddlers spoke less overall , and also spoke less about the story when they were looking at electronic books compared with print books, and another study that showed less social back-and-forth — the toddlers were more likely to be using the screens by themselves.

“There are some electronic books that are designed really well,” Dr. Munzer said, pointing to a study of one book (designed by PBS) that included a character who guided parents in engaging their children around the story. “On the other hand, there’s research that suggests that a lot of what you find in the most popular apps have all these visually salient features which distracts from the core content and makes it harder for kids to glean the content, harder for parents to have really rich dialogue.”

Still, she said, it’s not fair to expect parents to navigate this technology — it should be the job of the software developers to design electronic books that encourage language and interactions, tailored to a child’s developmental level.

With preschoolers as opposed to toddlers, Professor Baron said, “there are now beginning to be some smarter designs where the components of the book or the app help further the story line or encourage dialogic reading — that’s now part of the discussion.”

Dr. Radesky, who was involved in the research projects with Dr. Munzer, talked about the importance of helping children master reading that goes beyond specific remembered details — words or characters or events — so a child is “able to integrate knowledge gained from the story with life experience.” And again, she said, that isn’t what is stressed in digital design. “Stuff that makes you think, makes you slow down and process things deeply, doesn’t sell, doesn’t get the most clicks,” she said.

Parents can help with this when their children are young, Dr. Radesky said, by discussing the story and asking the questions that help children draw those connections.

For school-age kids

“When kids enter digital spaces, they have access to an infinite number of platforms and websites in addition to those e-books you’re supposed to be reading,” Dr. Radesky said. “We’ve all been on the ground helping our kids through remote learning and watching them not be able to resist opening up that tab that’s less demanding.”

“All through the fall I was constantly helping families manage getting their child off YouTube,” Dr. Radesky said. “They’re bored, it’s easy to open up a browser window,” as adults know all too well. “I’m concerned that during remote learning, kids have learned to orient toward devices with this very skimmy partial attention.”

Professor Baron said that in an ideal world, children would learn “how to read contiguous text for enjoyment, how to stop, how to reflect.”

In elementary school, she said, there’s an opportunity to start a conversation about the advantages of the different media: “It goes for print, goes for a digital screen, goes for audio, goes for video, they all have their uses — we need to make kids aware that not all media are best suited to all purposes.” Children can experiment with reading digitally and in print, and can be encouraged to talk about what they perceived and what they enjoyed.

Dr. Radesky talked about helping children develop what she called “metacognition,” in which they ask themselves questions like, “how does my brain feel, what does this do to my attention span?” Starting around the age of 8 to 10, she said, children are developing the skills to understand how they stay on task and how they get distracted. “Kids recognize when the classroom gets too busy; we want them to recognize when you go into a really busy digital space,” she said.

For older readers

In experiments with middle school and university students asked to read a passage and then be tested on it, Professor Baron said, there is a mismatch between how they feel they learn and how they actually perform.

Students who think they read better — or more efficiently — on the screen will still do better on the test if they have read the passage on the page. And college students who print out articles, she said, tend to have higher grades and better test scores. There is also research to suggest that university students who used authentic books, magazines or newspapers to write an essay wrote more sophisticated essays than those just given printouts.

With complex text in any format, slowing down helps. Professor Baron said that parents can model this at home, sitting and relaxing over a book, reading without rushing and perhaps generally de-emphasizing speed when it comes to learning. Teachers can be trained to help students develop “deep reading, mindful, focusing on the text,” she said.

For example, students can be trained in digital annotation, highlighting but also making marginal notes, so that they have to slow down and add their own words. “We’ve known that for years, we’ve done it with print, we have to realize that if you want to learn something from a digital document, annotate,” she said.

There are also studies that suggest that reading comprehension is better onscreen when readers page down — that is, when they see a page (or a screen) of text at a time, and then move to the next, rather than continuously scrolling through text.

Seeing information on the page may help a student see a book as something with a structure, rather than just text from which you grab some quick information.

No one is going to take screens out of children’s lives, or out of their learning. But the more we exploit the rich possibilities of digital reading, the more important it may be to encourage children to try out reading things in different ways, and to discuss what it feels like, and perhaps to have adults reflect on their own reading habits. Reading on digital devices can motivate recalcitrant readers, Professor Baron said, and there are many good reasons to do some of your reading on a screen.

But, of course, it’s a different experience.

“There’s a physicality,” Professor Baron said. “So many young people talk about the smell of books, talk about reading print as being ‘real’ reading.”

Dr. Perri Klass is the author of the book “A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future,” on how our world has been transformed by the radical decline of infant and child mortality. More about Perri Klass, M.D.

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Teenagers, adults spent more time on social media than reading books, magazines, newspapers

The year is 2018, and no matter where we are, it’s quite a common sight to see people immersed in their virtual universes on their cellphones. Whether it’s at a café or even a family gathering, social interactions have been somewhat replaced by social media or digital media. This is more evident in teenagers, who are Snapchatting more than reading novels or following hashtags rather than going through the morning newspaper. According to a study published in 2016, nearly 82 percent of 12th graders visited sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every day, while only 16 percent reported reading a book, magazine or newspaper every single day — compared to around 60 percent in the 70s. And although 33 percent of 10th graders said they read a newspaper almost every day in the 1990s, by 2016, this number had dropped to just 2 percent. Encountering people who leisurely read on a daily basis is rapidly becoming a rarity.

We may conclude that in these past ten or so years, with the arrival of this new virtual age, our lives have transformed drastically. To a teenager born in the 21 st century who has been exposed to social media from a young age, reading books for pleasure doesn’t seem like a top priority when most teenagers of the same age are so immersed in their virtual lives. Television was the undisputed king of digital media in the pre-internet era, and youngsters had little to no options for watching something that aligned with their interests. Thus, spending time reading books on topics of their interest was often a go-to.

Circumstances changed massively after the unprecedented introduction of the internet, and with time people, started using Google as their main source of information and knowledge. No doubt, the internet is perhaps one of the greatest inventions of modern era and it has made our lives much easier. But the internet nowadays is mostly dominated by social media sites, which in some ways have diverted from the main purpose of the internet. Teenagers prefer social media over books or magazines, as they may feel a sense of connection to a community from which they are accessing their knowledge. But the information on social media is often times unreliable — which usually isn’t the case for books.

With the world at our fingertips, we are multitasking all the time and receiving information from social media faster — often times at the expense of receiving the complete information. Thus, multitasking has made us more impatient when gathering knowledge. Rather than gaining quality information on a single topic, we go through multiple tasks and end up with incomplete knowledge on multiple topics. In order to read one book, one has to invest their time and completely focus on it. But a lack of attention span plus impatience may be the reason that teenagers today prefer quantity over quality. According to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, “the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013 (just one second below that of a goldfish).” We can’t completely blame social media for this decrease, but at the same time, giving excessive time to interacting in the virtual universe versus spending quality time in the real world undoubtedly has its repercussions.  

With different types of information on social media, youngsters today may look at a certain topic through a biased perspective. And why read a book on a given topic when there are several, shorter online sources to read instead? One writer on Quartz estimated that individuals could read 200 books a year if they used their time on social media to read instead. These figures are really disturbing, and every parent should make sure that their children spend some quality time reading books rather than being on social media for hours.

And this isn’t just the case for teenagers. Adults also spend more time online than being engrossed in leisure reading — university assigned readings or books on syllabi don’t count. There’s a need for fostering a reading culture in our homes and schools as social media, despite being more accessible, doesn’t enable us to think outside the box. The virtual experience isn’t as rewarding due to the lack of effort. Meanwhile, when reading a book we transcend to a whole new dimension; for example, book lovers often associate the smell of books to a certain experience and feeling in the past. Even the smell of a certain book can be reminiscent of fond memories (this is not possible with Kindles, let alone with social media).

It’s no wonder that Plato once said, “ Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” Books and reliable sources on the internet, not social media, should be our sources of knowledge because right now it’s more likely that a person will be influenced by the opinion of a horde of people on social media rather than take the opportunity to develop their own viewpoint.    

Written by: Kanwaljit Singh — [email protected]       

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Reading Books Vs Social Media: Which is Better?

We live in a world where social media is quickly becoming an indispensable part of our lives. Most people today are connected online and they prefer to stay in touch and communicate on social media. Also, many people prefer to read information and updates on social media and many believe that reading books is a better option than social media. If you are browsing the internet you will find many sites that mention that reading books offer more benefits than social media. They say that reading books is better than scrolling through an endless feed on your social media platform. 

However, let’s dive further and see if social media is all as bad as these websites claim.

Variety of Topics

A lot of websites claim that reading books can provide you with plenty of knowledge because of the variety of topics you can read about. You can find books that are fictional, non-fictional, autobiographies, self-help books and many other topics. Similarly, social media is a great tool to start reading because you are not stuck to that one specific book or topic. You can scroll through topics and find relevant topics and groups that interest you. 

Quality Content

When it comes to quality content, there is no doubt that books can provide you with more quality content on a specific topic or genre. On the other hand, when it comes to social media you would have to scroll through plenty of feeds before you come across groups and people that provide relevant and quality information. 

Power of Storytelling

If you are looking for a great storytelling experience, books should be your choice over social media. This is because books offer you an immersive storytelling experience which is hard to find on any social media platform. You often get connected with various characters in the story although they are usually fictional.  

Real-Time Insights

While books can provide you with the best storytelling experience and some memorable characters, they don’t offer real-time insights that you can get on social media. Social media is a world buzzing with activity and here you can find people commenting on various topics and posts offering real-time insights, updates and information that is hard to find in a book.

Improve Vocabulary

There are many ways to improve your vocabulary and reading books is one of them. Most people would recommend reading a book to build your vocabulary. However, finding new words isn’t just exclusive to books. You can find new words on a company flyer, some advertisement hoarding or in a fine dining restaurant menu.

Sense of Companionship

You can carry along your books on a flight and it can instantly allow you to immerse yourself in the content. While social media does offer some level of companionship it certainly differs from one person to another. If you are a part of a group you can talk to people on social media and stay connected and updated. 

Hence, both books and social media have certain similarities and differences which readers can explore to optimize their time and effort.

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Yes, teens are texting and using social media instead of reading books, researchers say

A new study has alarming findings, but is probably not surprising to anyone who knows a teenager: High-schoolers today are texting, scrolling and using social media instead of reading books and magazines.

In their free time, American adolescents are cradling their devices hours each day rather than losing themselves in print or long-form media, according to research published Monday by the American Psychological Association.

In fact, 1 in 3 U.S. high school seniors did not read a book for pleasure in 2016. In the same time period, 82 percent of 12th-graders visited sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every day.

Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and one of the authors of the study, said the lack of leisure reading is troubling. For her, the most important discovery hidden in the data is this statistic: In the 1970s, about 60 percent of high school seniors reported reading a book, magazine or newspaper every single day. Four decades later, in 2016, 16 percent of high school seniors reported doing so.

“This decline in reading print media — particularly the decline in reading books, it’s concerning,” said Twenge, author of the book “ iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us. ”

The reason for the concern is that the skill set and attention it takes to digest concepts in long-form writing are quite different from glancing at a text message or status update, she said.

“Reading long-form texts like books and magazine articles is really important for understanding complex ideas and for developing critical thinking skills,” Twenge said. “It’s also excellent practice for students who are going on to college.”

Teens who spend less time in front of screens are happier — up to a point, new research shows

The study, conducted by Twenge and two colleagues at San Diego State, Gabrielle Martin and Brian Spitzberg, is based on data culled through a survey project called Monitoring the Future that has been ongoing since 1975. Run by researchers at the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health, Monitoring the Future surveys high school students across the nation quizzing them on their career plans and drug use, among other things.

Twenge, Martin and Spitzberg analyzed self-reported reading habits of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders between 1976 and 2016, representing a total of more than 1 million teenagers. The researchers compared high-schoolers’ consumption of “legacy media” — books, newspapers and magazines — to their consumption of “digital media,” which includes the Internet, cellphone texts, video games and social media sites.

The decline in reading rates of legacy media began in the early 1980s and accelerated swiftly after the mid-2000s, when smartphones and high-speed Internet access became widely available. At the same time, high-schoolers’ screen time, including television, began to rise — nearly tripling between the late 1970s and the mid-2010s, according to the study.

In 2016, 12th-graders reported devoting about six hours of their free time every day to digital media. Tenth-graders reported devoting five hours, and eighth-graders reporting devoting four hours.

Twenge said she and her co-authors think that the trends are intertwined. The data shows that, given an hour to themselves, teens would rather pick up their devices than a book. “Does digital media displace the leisure time people once spent on legacy media? We find that the answer is yes,” she said.

This simple solution to smartphone addiction is now used in over 600 U.S. schools

The racial and gender breakdown of the surveyed group roughly matched national  demographics, and the main findings did not vary according to race, gender or socioeconomic status, Twenge said. There was one slight difference between the sexes: Girls reported visiting social media sites more often than boys, while boys reported spending more time on video games.

The survey question asking students whether and how often they read books, magazines and newspapers did not differentiate between print and electronic versions of these items. Twenge acknowledged that this could mean the study’s results underestimate or discount the amount of time high-schoolers spend reading online.

But this is unlikely, especially with regard to books, she said. The study cites previous research in support of the idea that students view books and e-books as falling under the same umbrella, meaning the study’s findings probably pretty accurately reflect teenagers’ reading habits.

Twenge, herself a mother of three, said she suspects many parents will find the new study worrisome. Not only could less time spent reading translate to poorer performance in college, but also social media usage has been shown to lead to increased social isolation and mental health issues .

So, what can parents do to make their teenager put down the phone and crack open a book?

Melinda Gates: I spent my career in technology. I wasn’t prepared for its effect on my kids.

The solution can require a complicated dance between coercion and suggestion, said Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of “ Raising Kids Who Read .”

The first step is prying your kids away from their screens, Willingham said. But don’t tie lack of screen time to enforced reading. Don’t, for example, take your teenager’s phone and tell him he can have it back once he has read for 30 minutes.

“This is not the way we treat things that we want to teach children are pleasurable,” Willingham said. “I mean, think about it. You would never think of coercing your child into having a piece of cake.”

Instead, when enforcing a temporary ban on devices, make sure that books are the second-best option available (after the forbidden screens) to stave off boredom. One way to do this, according to Dean-Michael Crosby, a teacher at a school in England who often advises parents on this issue, is to “litter your house with eye-catching titles.” He suggested leaving books lying around the living room, the kitchen, even the bathrooms.

“Even if they pick one up to browse as they’re waiting for the kettle to boil, that might be just the book for them,” Crosby said. “That might be the book that hooks them forever!”

Both Willingham and Crosby advised trying graphic novels. With their abundance of pictures — coupled with more mature themes and age-appropriate content — these books can help usher reluctant teens into the world of literature.

Another way to instill a love for reading is to teach kids how useful it can be. The next time your child comes to you with a question, Willingham said, tell them to go find the answer by visiting a library and reading about the issue on their own. Explain that books offer a level of in-depth knowledge not available through the “instant gratification” of the Internet.

Finally, it’s important to model good reading behavior. “That almost goes without saying,” Willingham said. “If you’re nagging your child to read, and you’re just sort of on Instagram all the time, why in the world would they take that seriously?”

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13 Books About Social Media Influencers That Reflect the Changing Landscape

Erin Mayer is a writer and editor specializing in personal essays and musings about face creams that probably won't cure her anxiety (but hey, it's worth a shot). Her work has appeared on Bustle, Literary Hub, Man Repeller, Business Insider, and more. She spends her free time drafting tweets she never finishes and reading in front of the television. Find her at erinmayer.com .

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The internet has changed the world in meaningful ways. It stands to reason that the internet would change our books too. And I don’t just mean how we  read  them, either. I’m talking about the literal content of our books, which is constantly shifting to capture current web culture. Lately, I’ve been interested in reading books about social media influencers. Particularly, fiction in which influencers are a central part of the narration, though nonfiction written by people who make a living on Instagram and YouTube is fascinating too. Here are 13 great reads that focus on social media influencers and their role in an ever-evolving society.

Fiction About Social Media Influencers

1. the circle by dave eggers.

If you’re looking for an excuse to quit the internet and become a woods-dwelling hermit,  The Circle  is it. This is an absolutely chilling novel about a woman named Mae Holland who goes to work for a powerful (think: Google) Silicon Valley company that quickly takes over her life. And I mean, her entire  life. It’s all about the things we give up for the sake of convenience and digital connectivity.

2. Follow Me Back by A.V. Geiger

Tessa Hart is agoraphobic, but on Twitter she’s @TessaHeartsEric, one of the preeminent members of the fandom for pop star Eric Thorn. When one of her posts goes viral, she catches the object of her affection’s attention…however, maybe not for the reasons she hoped. There are mixed reviews on Amazon and Goodreads about the agoraphobia representation in this book, so maybe read a few reader responses before you dive in.

3. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

This is a thoroughly modern exploration of what it means to find viral fame on the internet. April May, a normal twentysomething with a corporate graphic design job, is first to discover and document a mysterious statue that appears on the streets of Manhattan. Her video catapults her to international notoriety literally overnight as these statues, dubbed “the Carls,” appear in cities all over the world. April has to balance her new reality as a public figure with the mystery of the Carls.

4. Don’t Call Me Baby by Gwendolyn Heasley

Mommy bloggers are endlessly fascinating and it’s about time we got some fiction about them. Imogene grew up in the spotlight thanks to her mother documenting every milestone on her popular parenting website. As a teenager, she finally gets the opportunity to tell her side of the story thanks to a school project.

5. Surveys  by Natasha Stagg

Like Hank Green’s April May, the main character of  Surveys is a young woman who somewhat accidentally finds fame as an influencer. Like most young influencers, she moves to Los Angeles and falls in love. However, nothing quite goes according to plan. It’s a satirical coming-of-age novel that sounds perfect for fans of the movie  Ingrid Goes West.

6. # FashionVictim by Amina Akhtar

Akhtar’s debut novel is about a fashion editor with a to-die-for social media presence. She’s so eager to be on top of her game she’s willing to do anything to get there. Described on the blurb as “ Dexter  meets  The Devil Wears Prada ,” this is a deliciously wild ride.

7. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

Shy Eliza Mirks is reserved at school and popular on the internet. Online, she illustrates the webcomic Monstrous Sea  for her millions of subscribers. Then Wallace Warland moves to town. He draws her out of her shell and threatens to upend the careful balance between Eliza’s two lives. The book also uses mixed-media to tell the story.

6. Snotgirl Vol. 1: Green Hair Don’t Care by Bryan Lee O’Malley and Leslie Hung

The creator of  Scott Pilgrim  brings us this graphic novel about fashion blogger Lottie Person. Lee O’Malley brilliantly parodies the stereotypical Los Angeles social media star lifestyle. Leslie Hung’s gorgeous illustrations bring the story to life. Influencers lend themselves well to comic books. Both rely heavily on aesthetics, after all. Also, I love the gross title contrasted with the glam cover.

8. # Murdertrending by Gretchen McNeil

This books takes place in a near-future world where public executions are once again a thing…on an app called The Postman. In other words, it’s a pretty grim take on social media mob mentality.

9. Internet Famous by Danika Stone

The title is a little on-the-nose, but  Internet Famous  is a charming romance. Madison Nakama is a social media star whose flirtation with a commenter catches the attention of a relentless troll.

11. Ripper  by Isabel Allende

A modern take on Jack the Ripper featuring an online mystery game and a teenage detective? Sign me up! It’s the perfect internet book for thriller fans.

Non-fiction About Social Media Influencers

12. capture your style by aimee song.

In Capture Your Style ,  Song of Style ‘s Aimee Song shows the work that goes into creating the perfect Instagram. She uses pictures from her own social media profiles to illustrate her photography, style, and editing tips. You’ll learn how to take professional-quality images using only your iPhone and a few apps.

13.  Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion   by Jia Tolentino

This isn’t “about influencers” the same way other books on this list are. But New Yorker  staff writer Jia Tolentino is an essential voice on the topic of internet culture. Several of these essays indeed do focus on “the nightmare social internet,” as the official blurb puts it, and how it’s changing us, for worse or for better.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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Telling #Stories: Can Social Media Make Us Better Writers?

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Five of the best books about social media

From online courtroom to information manipulation, social media has radically changed communication. Here are five books to help navigate it

F rom Covid conspiracy theories to recent speculations about Catherine, Princess of Wales, social media is at the heart of how we share information, and misinformation, with one another in the 21st century. For those who want to have a better understanding of social media and how it affects us, here are a selection of titles that explore how we consume, share, and manipulate information on social media platforms.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Journalist and author Jon Ronson argues we live in “a great renaissance of public shaming”, and this book tracks down some of the many victims of online shaming to understand what happened to them as a result. In the process, we learn about Ronson’s own values, question our own, and figure out how we’ve reached a time where an online feed can become a social courtroom.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

After getting repeatedly mistaken for feminist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf online, and then in real life, Naomi Klein penned Doppelganger as an earnest and introspective look at herself. The book explores how conspiracy theories and lies spread quickly through the internet, and how the social and political climate of the physical world manipulates the way we experience online platforms. While not exclusively about social media, the story behind Doppelganger is a perfect case of the ways our digital lives and identities intersect with what we experience in reality – and how dangerous the repercussions of spreading online lies can be.

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Irresistible by Adam Alter

Have you ever wondered why you can’t stop scrolling on your TikTok “for you” page, or obsessing over how many likes you got on a recent Facebook post? You’re not alone, and Adam Alter’s book explores why we get sucked into the digital world. He answers what makes an online addiction, whether it be to emails, Instagram, or Netflix, different to other forms of addiction – and warns us of the dangers this could cause long-term. As well as introspection, he gives practical solutions to how digital addiction can be controlled for good.

Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

Journalist Taylor Lorenz calls this book “a social history of social media”; she uses real-life case studies of mothers, teenagers, politicians and influencers to assess how social media touches all demographics. Extremely Online explores topics from the digital economy and influencer culture, to what makes moments go viral on Twitter and how this is all influencing the way we socialise and understand the world. At its core, this book explores the idea of what it means to connect – and how social media as an innovation has warped communication.

TikTok Boom by Chris Stokel-Walker

TikTok is arguably one of the most significant advancements in social media in the past two decades. This book by journalist and writer Chris Stokel-Walker explores how the app is changing the way users interact with content . It moves away from the social-commentary style of the other books mentioned here, instead using business and technology analysis as a means to describe wider socio-political repercussions of the app. Stokel-Walker bridges the gap between the digital and the physical, showing the feedback loop that exists between what happens online on platforms such as TikTok and the real world.

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Opinion: Does social media rewire kids’ brains? Here’s what the science really says

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America’s young people face a mental health crisis, and adults constantly debate how much to blame phones and social media. A new round of conversation has been spurred by Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation,” which contends that rising mental health issues in children and adolescents are the result of social media replacing key experiences during formative years of brain development.

The book has been criticized by academics , and rightfully so. Haidt’s argument is based largely on research showing that adolescent mental health has declined since 2010, coinciding roughly with mass adoption of the smartphone. But of course, correlation is not causation. The research we have to date suggests that the effects of phones and social media on adolescent mental health are probably much more nuanced.

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That complex picture is less likely to get attention than Haidt’s claims because it doesn’t play as much into parental fears. After all, seeing kids absorbed in their phones, and hearing that their brains are being “rewired,” calls to mind an alien world-domination plot straight from a sci-fi film.

And that’s part of the problem with the “rewiring the brain” narrative of screen time. It reflects a larger trope in public discussion that wields brain science as a scare tactic without yielding much real insight.

First, let’s consider what the research has shown so far . Meta-analyses of the links between mental health and social media give inconclusive or relatively minor results. The largest U.S. study on childhood brain development to date did not find significant relationships between the development of brain function and digital media use . This month, an American Psychological Assn. health advisory reported that the current state of research shows “ using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people” and that its effects depend on “pre-existing strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.”

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So why the insistence from Haidt and others that smartphones dangerously rewire the brain? It stems from misunderstandings of research that I have encountered frequently as a neuroscientist studying emotional development, behavioral addictions and people’s reactions to media.

Imaging studies in neuroscience typically compare some feature of the brain between two groups: one that does not do a specific behavior (or does it less frequently) and one that does the behavior more frequently. When we find a relationship, all it means is either that the behavior influences something about the functioning of this brain feature, or something about this feature influences whether we engage in the behavior.

In other words, an association between increased brain activity and using social media could mean that social media activates the identified pathways, or people who already have increased activity in those pathways tend to be drawn to social media, or both.

Fearmongering happens when the mere association between an activity such as social media use and a brain pathway is taken as a sign of something harmful on its own. Functional and structural research on the brain cannot give enough information to objectively identify increases or decreases in neural activity, or in a brain region’s thickness, as “good” or “bad.” There is no default healthy status quo that everybody’s brains are measured against, and doing nearly any activity involves many parts of the brain.

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“The Anxious Generation” neglects these subtleties when, for example, it discusses a brain system known as the default mode network. This system decreases in activity when we engage with spirituality, meditation and related endeavors, and Haidt uses this fact to claim that social media is “not healthy for any of us” because studies suggest that it by contrast increases activity in the same network.

But the default mode network is just a set of brain regions that tend to be involved in internally focused thinking, such as contemplating your past or making a moral judgment, versus externally focused thinking such as playing chess or driving an unfamiliar route. Its increased activity does not automatically mean something unhealthy.

This type of brain-related scare tactic is not new. A common version, which is also deployed for smartphones , involves pathways in the brain linked to drug addiction, including areas that respond to dopamine and opioids. The trope says that any activity associated with such pathways is addictive, like drugs, whether it’s Oreos , cheese , God , credit card purchases , sun tanning or looking at a pretty face . These things do involve neural pathways related to motivated behavior — but that does not mean they damage our brains or should be equated with drugs.

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Adolescence is a time when the brain is particularly plastic, or prone to change. But change doesn’t have to be bad. We should take advantage of plasticity to help teach kids healthy ways to self-manage their own use of, and feelings surrounding, smartphones.

Do I expect future findings on the adolescent brain to immediately quell parents’ fears on this issue? Of course not — and the point is that they shouldn’t. Brain imaging data is a fascinating way to explore interactions between psychology, neuroscience and social factors. It’s just not a tool for declaring behaviors to be pathological. Feel free to question whether social media is good for kids — but don’t misuse neuroscience to do so.

Anthony Vaccaro is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Southern California’s Psychology department.

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