Shared Reading in the Age of Digitalization

This is a wiki-style blog made by the students of the MA course Digital Social Reading at the University of Basel in the fall semester of 2023. Thanks to Gitbook for providing this space for free.

Author: Prof. Dr. Moniek Kuijpers

The Digital Social Reading course I organised in the fall semester of 2023 was inspired by my current research project "Shared Reading in the Age of Digitalization". This project was founded because in the last decades researchers have found declines in both reading skills and well-being of young adults. Often these declines have been blamed on the rise of digitalization in our society, without enough evidence to support such claims (Przybylski & Orben, 2019). In this project, we are empirically investigating how engaging in social activities surrounding the act of reading can affect reading habits and a sense of well-being.

In this course I wanted to showcase a variety of such social activities, for which we use the umbrella term "Digital Social Reading practices". For that purpose I invited expert speakers on several topics, such as Federico Pianzola to give "An Introduction to Digital Social Reading", Maria Kraxenberger on "Wreading and Fanfiction", Sonali Kulkarni on "Book talk on BookTok", Cristina Loi on "The Impact of Wattpad, Interactive Fiction and Book Reading".

This is by no means an exhaustive list of digital social reading practices that avid readers engage with (think of, for example, Bookstagram, BookTube, Online book clubs, etc.), but it was meant as a broad overview of activities. Many of our speakers talked about the popularity of these practices, with participation numbers running into the millions. The online spaces in which these practices take place, are mostly inhabited by young adults, which shows that there is a large number of young adults that do actively engage in reading and other practices, such as writing reviews, fan fiction or engaging in conversations about reading. What does it mean then that some research still finds declines in reading skills (Schleicher, 2019)? Could it be that we are measuring reading skills wrong? Perhaps we are measuring an outdated idea of what reading should look like?

For example, a lot of these practices are mostly conducted in the English language, but young adults from all kinds of language areas are engaging in them, meaning they are learning not only to read, but also express themselves in a second language. Their communication and reading skills is also inevitably coloured by the platforms they are choosing to engage with (Pianzola, 2021) or the affinity spaces (Gee, 2005) they share with like-minded people.

In order to fully understand this conundrum, we need to empirically investigate what it means to read in the digital age, what kind of skills it takes and how to measure them. For that we require a range of different empirical and computational methods to conduct such research, which brings us to the other half of the presentations given in this course, namely the presentations showcasing a variety of methods used to investigate these practices.

We have had presentations from Simone Rebora on "Scraping Data from Social Networking Sites", from DeNel Rehberg Sedo and Danielle Fuller on "Digital Ethnography and Participatory Research", from Massimo Lusetti on "Machine Learning", and from Anastasia Glawion and Tina Ternes on "Network Analysis" and I presented myself on "Manual annotation of Online Book Reviews". Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list of methods used to study reading in the digital age, but it at least gave fitting examples of methods from more qualitative empirical research, such as annotation and ethnography, and methods from computational studies, such as machine learning and data scraping.

I believe research into reading in the digital age needs to go beyond theoretical reflections, which can be coloured by researchers' bias about what reading should look like and instead should use a combination of empirical methods to come close to a comprehensive understanding of what reading looks like nowadays and how it affects people's mental health. Method triangulation is especially important when studying relatively new phenomena, such as digital social reading, as it allows us to look at such phenomena from different angles.

For example, when using computational methods we can get an idea of patterns of reading behaviour on digital social reading platforms on a very large scale, which allows us to see how reading habits have shifted in the digital age (Pianzola, Rebora & Lauer, 2020). On the other hand, ethnographic and annotation methods allow us to dive deeper into individual readers' experiences, one by asking readers directly about their experience (Fuller & Rehberg Sedo, 2013), the other by close reading their reader testimonials in the form of book reviews (Kuijpers et al., 2023) or commentary.

References

NextIntroduction to Digital Social Reading

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