Read outside your algorithm

I often question how much of what I like is really mine, especially when considering the books I read. If you scroll long enough, the internet will ultimately show you something it believes you’ll enjoy reading. Then it hands you 10 more books exactly like it.

It becomes hard to deny, then, that what you’re shown over and over will eventually become your literary niche, but there’s something fulfilling about enjoying a book you picked off the shelf without knowing whether or not you would end up liking it. We often forget the value in stumbling upon a book naturally, but UT offers thousands of these opportunities for students within their libraries.

Your social media algorithms are designed to learn you. They regurgitate the information you feed them. Sometimes, I enjoy being recommended music I actually want to hear. I like finding a book because someone on the internet convinced me it was worth reading. The problem arises when social media recommendations become the primary way we encounter new reading material.

“If you’re only reading a certain thing … you don’t really have any idea of other kinds of writing,” English sophomore Sara Olenik said. “I feel like if you read other genres, you can discover other things that you like.”

A book can pique your interest in a topic you previously thought was boring, and literature can show you life from a viewpoint you’d never thought about. For instance, philosophy is full of concepts that are challenging or diametrically opposed to your current beliefs. Reading outside of your comfort zone is more than an exercise to keep yourself intellectually active — conversations about what we read are more valuable than how many books we consume, and rapid consumption is certainly something social media encourages us to do. 

“What’s important about the books is how you talk about them, as opposed to actually reading them,” said Rohan Bhat, fourth-year philosophy PhD candidate. “Books are an art form. You converse with that author or let that author talk to you for days on end … you spend time with one person’s thoughts, and they’re very developed, as opposed to two-minute reels … that keep switching, and you don’t really get into the ideas at all.”

UT students have a great opportunity to practice this challenging kind of reading and its reward. Our libraries alone contain an enormous range of subjects, authors and periods, but it is still easy to only think of the library as somewhere you go to study or where you get a book for class.

“Because of how well the algorithm works, it’s not necessarily that they’ll hop on a linear BookTok train, but whatever their previous interests are, they’ll just be continuously sucked down into them,” said Christopher Trevino, an English and philosophy junior. “I do think that people are getting too absorbed in their own interests and, in some way, themselves.”

Reading outside of your algorithm does not have to become another form of self-improvement, and you don’t have to replace your BookTok suggestion with a “more impressive” option that you’ll inevitably be bored with. But once in a while, pick the book with the ugly cover or a genre you don’t typically read. I encourage you to go to a floor in the PCL you’ve never been on, browse a section you know nothing about, and ask a librarian what they would recommend instead. Let your algorithm be wrong about you. You might find something outside of what your social media feed thinks you’ll enjoy.

Henry is an English and philosophy sophomore from San Angelo, Texas.

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