by Kylee Walton
Recently my partner shared with me a video of a guy talking about current day reading habits, specifically on “BookTok”, a community on TikTok that’s focused on reading and the promotion of reading. BookTok blew up around 2020 and it birthed a whole new reading culture, one that made reading accessible and desirable. However, BookTok has grown into a community that many people bash, that many people say is a disgrace to the classic culture of reading. When BookTok first blew up, I remember being quite happy. A hobby I long cherished since childhood has been made appealing and more accessible to the public. Years past, BookTok evolved, and reading has now become a marketing scheme.
Conversation about literature has died on BookTok, because the conversation around books has been boiled down to essentially nothing, merely one word statements that encapsulate the entire reading experience. A reason for this is due to how BookTok creators have to bend to the TikTok algorithm and the pains of short-form content, which has evolved BookTok content into exaggerated, yet surface level, reactions to books or the reading experience. Books are being rated and reviewed by people through statements like “I love” or “I hate” rather than having a nuanced, analytical conversation about the piece of literature they just spent hours indulging in. I feel as though some people have forgotten what books are. They’re pieces of art that have years put into them. That have been edited, revised, edited again, revised again, over and over until everything clicks for the author.
The current attitude towards books and reading has deeply saddened me, and I feel as though the introduction of AI has not helped with this. I’ve come across videos of people explaining how they’ve read 100 books in a week and it’s because they used an AI program to summarize books and they read that instead of reading the actual books.
Oh wow, how did we get here?
I’ve noticed myself falling victim to this too because a big issue in BookTok is rapid consumption. People are more concerned about how many books they’re reading rather than what they’re receiving from the books they’re reading. There’s no sitting with a book, exploring what it means culturally, what it means to you as a reader, what it’s saying about a topic, how it makes you feel; it’s just about devouring one book and moving on to the next time. It’s just about using books to gain traction on social media, using buzzwords to attract a certain audience. It has all become a marketing scheme.
I think to myself sometimes that I’m not reading enough, that I actually don’t know how to read because I’ve only read fifteen books so far this year. The current reading attitude has had an effect on me too and has made me feel like a poor reader because I’m not reading 100 books in a year. When I snap out of this, I realize what distances me from these other readers. I’m spending more time with a book than they are, and that is not a bad thing. If so much time was put into writing a book, shouldn’t a significant amount be put into reading it as well? Shouldn’t we be reflecting back on what we’ve read, examining what it means to us, what it’s saying about society and cultural norms, and how we’re actively participating in the norms that the book is critiquing? That’s what’s so beautiful about books to me, what they can toss right back in our faces and how we can be in awe of that.
The optimist in me is still hopeful. People are reading at least and that’s so important right now. I just feel this dread that every reflective hobby will fall into the trap that is capitalism, that is turning art into marketing for profit. Despite this, the writer’s words, the heart of their work, is still there, still beating. That part cannot be lost.
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