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. In this project, we will empirically investigate what it means to read in the digital age and how engaging in social activities surrounding the act of reading can affect well-being and reading habits.

This project will investigate Shared Reading – reading and discussing literary texts together – in different contexts. It will compare face-to-face Shared Reading groups to Digital Social Reading practices that take place online on different social media platforms. The research focuses on the underlying mechanisms of Shared Reading. What is it in Shared Reading that leads to positive effects? Is it a sense of absorption during reading that distracts from worries or perhaps it is the sense of belonging to a community?

During the project we will develop corpora, tools and instruments that can be used by other researchers in the fields of empirical literary studies and digital humanities, which we will make openly available on Open Science Framework. The findings of this project will be directly beneficial for the shared reading programs that our collaborators Sharing Stories Verein in Basel and The Reader in Liverpool offer and together we will write up a report on Shared Reading in the digital age and its effects on reading promotion and well-being targeted at European policy makers in education and welfare. 

How do young adults read and share stories online?

As young adults are increasingly more involved in online reading practices, but these practices are woefully under-investigated, it is important that we obtain an understanding of how these platforms are used, and through what mechanisms these types of shared reading activities affect readers’ sense of well-being and their reading habits. We call these practices “Digital Social Reading”, as they are mediated digitally, involve some sort of social interaction or use of social platforms, and centre around the activity of reading.

More specifically, we mean practices such as the following:

• rate or write book reviews on Goodreads
• share or look for book recommendations on BookTok & Bookstagram
• watch other readers on BookTube or Twitch
• engage in conversations on platforms like Discord, Tumblr, or Twitter (X)
• read or contribute to fanfiction (e.g. on AO3 or Wattpad)
• read or provide scanlations
• and much more

We hope to arrive at a better sense of what the most popular platforms are and what kind of practices young adults engage in on these platforms. Additionally, we are interested in whether the practices they engage in benefit their reading habits and sense of well-being.