Technological Transformations of Reading Culture

The increasing use of social media along with the rapidly developing digitization of the book has led to a range of new circumstances for writing, publishing and reading books, resulting in transformations in reading culture and practices. The social aspect of reading is emphasized when readers in social online settings describe, track, evaluate and discuss their reading experiences on social websites and networks. Authors and readers interact in new and immediate ways, negotiating notions of quality, authority and ownership. These social technologies thus implicate practices which transform relations in the network of writers, publishers, readers, and reviewers. Similarly, the increasing use of electronic reading devices plays a key role in the acceleration of a culture in which the audience engages with cultural works in new ways. The print book has an “easy materiality” (Marshall, 2010, p. 17), but with the electronic book, the materiality of reading becomes more ambiguous and malleable as the book as technology is being radically reconstructed. The purpose of this paper is to explore these changes through an investigation into the technology relations (Ihde, 1990) in fiction reading culture from a perspective on reading as a social and material practice, exploring readers’ articulations of their engagement with book objects on the social websites Twitter and Goodreads.