Brian Laird on WNYC.

So Jake Hasky and Kang, staff writer at The New Yorker, has a new piece in his fault lines column, asking whether quitting social media actually leads us back to

reading books or whether the relationship between our screens and our reading lives is more

complicated than that familiar narrative suggests. He also raises maybe a bigger question,

what does literacy even mean when we actually spend more time than ever reading, but it's online,

not so much in books. Jay Kaspian Ken joins us now. Jay, always great to have you. Welcome

back to WNYC. Great. Thank you. It's good to be back. And listeners, our phones are open. How

to social media affect your other reading habits? And in particular,

we're going to hear Jay's experience along these lines. If you have ever tried a social media or,

let's say, smartphone detox, what did you actually do more of? Did you read more books or anything

else? 212-433 WNIC? Or what are your observations on the

relationship between our online lives and reading? 212-433 WNYC, 433-9-6-9-2.

So, Jay, last summer, I see you did take a step away from social media.

What did you do and with what purpose?

Well, I was trying to finish a book and I had a deadline coming up and I was a little worried that I wasn't going to hit it.

And so I just thought, well, if I get off Twitter, if I get off TikTok, Instagram, whatever,

then I'll have some more time.

And I had done this before and it had worked.

And so, yeah, I got off and then I finished the book quite quickly after that.

So I think in terms of that, it was a great way to optimize my hours

into work. But I was also hoping that like everything that I had read about attention spans

getting shorter because of social media and the fact that like short form video was particularly

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