The Fire and the Fog

On the night of 20 October 2020, something happened at Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos. What exactly happened is still being argued. What is not in dispute is this: young Nigerians had used Twitter to organise the most significant youth protest this country had seen in a generation. Within days, <a class="tc-blue" href="https://twocents.space/insights/tag/endsars">#EndSARS</a> was the top trending hashtag in the world. Over two million tweets. Rihanna amplified it. Kanye West amplified it. A police unit that had terrorised Nigerians for years was disbanded within ten days of the protests going viral. Social media had achieved what no editorial, no petition, no carefully written essay had managed in decades of trying. And then the fog came in. Images circulated of a woman wrapped in a blood-soaked Nigerian flag. She had not been shot at Lekki. The photograph was from a drama performance in Akwa Ibom State. A hashtag declared the President dead. He was not dead. A claim spread that carrying the Nigerian flag would protect protesters from soldiers. Fact-checkers at the Centre for Democracy and Development described the period as one where misinformation carried "the same potential as weapons of mass destruction." The protest that social media built, social media also helped to unravel. This is the question before us. Has social media replaced books as the real driver of knowledge and influence? My answer is no. But the reason is more important than the answer. Social media is genuinely powerful. #EndSARS proved it. So did <a class="tc-blue" href="https://twocents.space/insights/tag/bringbackourgirls">#BringBackOurGirls</a>, <a class="tc-blue" href="https://twocents.space/insights/tag/metoo">#MeToo</a>, and the Arab Spring. Platforms once dismissed as spaces for gossip and photographs have mobilised governments, toppled officials, and handed a microphone to millions who had none. The reach is real. The speed is extraordinary. Anyone who waves social media aside as shallow has not been paying attention to what it has already changed. But here is the distinction the question is truly asking us to make: power is not the same thing as knowledge. Influence is not the same thing as understanding. And speed, for all its excitement, is not the same thing as depth. This is where books hold ground that social media cannot take. Knowledge does not merely require information to move. It requires information to be accurate, tested, and rich enough to survive scrutiny. Social media delivers content at a pace no previous generation has witnessed. Whether that content produces knowledge depends on something the algorithm does not measure and was never designed to care about: whether what is spreading is true. Research from Indiana University found that less than one per cent of users on X were responsible for nearly three quarters of all content flagged as misinformation. A system where a handful of anonymous accounts can shape what millions absorb as fact is not a knowledge system. It is a loudness system. And loudness, history has repeatedly shown, is not wisdom. It goes deeper than that. Researchers at the University of Texas, publishing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, found that sharing content on social media makes people feel more knowledgeable even when they have not read what they shared. The act of passing information along creates the feeling of having absorbed it. They called it a "miscalibrated sense of knowledge that can be hard to correct." Consider what this means in practice: three out of every five links shared on social media have not been read by the person sharing them. Knowledge is not moving. Only the sensation of it is. Books are built differently. A book demands that a writer sit with an argument long enough to construct it honestly, to find its weaknesses, to defend it under pressure. It demands that a reader follow that argument across pages and days, push back, absorb, and return. This is slow. It is also how genuine understanding forms. Decades of research confirm that sustained reading builds cognition, critical thinking, vocabulary, and empathy. These are not soft benefits. They are the architecture of a mind that can tell fire from fog. When Chinua Achebe published *Things Fall Apart* in 1958, it did not trend. It built something. That novel gave Africa the right to narrate its own humanity, not for a news cycle, but for generations. When Upton Sinclair published *The Jungle* in 1906, exposing the horror of American meatpacking factories, Congress held hearings and food safety laws changed. The influence of that book outlived every newspaper that covered it, every pamphlet distributed around it, and every public speech made about it. Social media produces influence that moves like fire. Books produce influence that moves like roots. Both are real. They are simply not the same thing. The richness that books offer cannot be replicated in a caption or a comment thread. Richness requires room. Room to be wrong before you are right. Room to sit inside a complicated idea until it becomes yours. Room to be changed quietly, without an audience watching and reacting in real time. That kind of change is slower. It is also deeper. It is also the kind that lasts. The most honest answer to this question is that we have not lost books to social media. We have lost our patience for them. We have begun mistaking the speed of a post for the weight of an argument, the heat of a trending topic for the light of actual knowledge. We scroll, we share, we feel informed. But feeling informed and being informed are not the same country. Social media showed us what was happening at Lekki Toll Gate in real time. A judicial panel, working slowly through evidence over an entire year, attempted to tell us what was actually true. Five years later, the argument continues. Speed moved the story. Rigour is still trying to settle it. That gap between what travels fast and what is finally true is where books have always done their work. Social media has not replaced that work. It has simply made it easier to forget why the work matters.

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