With more and more young people having social media accounts; reading has become a fad for youth to follow.
Whilst social media has created a safe and positive space for young readers to develop and nurture a love for reading.
But are they necessarily consuming the right books for them?
Lots of books are intended for a more mature audience but through social media are getting into the hands of younger children.
Miss Grainger, local school librarian, said:”Booktok is very much a double-edged sword when it comes to literacy. It has encouraged so many disengaged readers to view reading as something “on-trend”, allowing it to become a shared experience, and showcase positive reading role models. Readers are also able to use Booktok to widen their exposure to different genres and writing styles”.
Social Media has created a safe space and also a way for authors to directly interact and share news with their audience.
This allows young people to have role models they can directly look up to and they can understand how those people got to their level of success and aspire towards that goal.
It also allows young people to find what books they do and don’t like and align themselves with content creators who enjoy the same book they do.
But on the contrary she also admits: “Sometimes following a Booktok ‘craze’ can discourage readers from finding the books that will best suit them. There is also frequently a clash between the age of a lot of the Booktok audience- specifically young teenagers and pre-teens- and the target audeince for some definitely ‘adult’ books. Not only can this create an issue for younger readers accessing content that may be disturbing or overwhelming for them, but it also potentially leads them to attempt books they struggle with in terms of their current literacy levels. There is nothing more disheartening than desperately wanting to talk about the latest ‘must-reads’, but not being able to comprehend it.”
Grainger makes a great point that if young people read books that are out of their reading levels it can discourage them from reading in general.
This could make people lose out on a love for reading because they felt pressured to follow the next “big thing”.
It could also pressure them into reading certain books because everyone else around them does when it might just not fit into their own personal taste.
Social media is opening new doors for young people to learn more about hobbies and interests they never knew they had.
But it is also costing those doors for people who may agree with the newest trend that is circulating.
That does not mean social media has killed people’s love for reading, it just means that reading has evolved alongside technology.
Not everyone is going to love the writing style that a certain author has and not everyone will be able to grasp the same concepts that certain authors write about.
Which is not necessarily a bad or good thing, it is just what happens as time passes.
