Exercise: Developmental editing, structural editing and line editing
Format: Original draft → Edited version → Editorial notes
How Social Media Is Changing the Way Young People Read
Social media has changed a lot of things about our lives, and one of the biggest things it has changed is the way young people read. Today, young people spend a lot of time on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and other apps, and because of this they are consuming a lot more short-form content than people did before. This has had both positive and negative effects on reading habits.
One of the biggest changes is that young people now have shorter attention spans. Because social media content is usually very short, people get used to consuming information quickly. Videos may only be a few seconds or minutes long, and social media posts are usually short too. This means that when young people try to read books or long articles, they can find it difficult to concentrate for long periods of time because they have become used to getting information very quickly.
Another issue is that people are constantly distracted by notifications. Even when someone is reading a book, their phone might be beside them and they may stop reading every few minutes to check their messages, Instagram or other notifications. This interrupts the reading experience and makes it harder to become fully immersed in a book. In the past, people did not have this many distractions when they were reading.
However, social media is not completely bad for reading. In fact, it has also encouraged many young people to read more. For example, BookTok has become extremely popular and many books have become popular because people recommend them on TikTok. Young people can find recommendations very easily and discover books that they might not otherwise have heard about. Reading has also become something that people can share with others online, which can make it feel more social and exciting.
At the same time, there is also a problem with the way books are sometimes discussed on social media. Books may be reduced to tropes or aesthetics instead of being discussed seriously. People may choose a book because it has a pretty cover, because it is popular online, or because it contains a certain romantic trope. This is not necessarily bad, but it can encourage people to think about books more as products or trends rather than works of literature.
Social media has also changed the way people expect information to be presented. People are now used to short paragraphs, bullet points and quick explanations. Long and complicated texts may therefore seem more difficult or boring. This could have consequences for education because students still need to read textbooks, academic papers and literature which cannot always be shortened.
Overall, social media has had both good and bad effects on reading. It has helped young people discover books and created new communities of readers, but it has also made it harder for some people to concentrate on long texts. Social media is probably not going away, so young people need to find a balance between using social media and continuing to read books.
How Social Media Is Changing the Way Young People Read
It is difficult to remember, now that a telephone may contain a library, a newspaper, a cinema, a correspondence desk and several thousand strangers simultaneously demanding one's attention, that reading was once an activity comparatively difficult to interrupt. A book might certainly be abandoned through boredom, a newspaper folded in favour of conversation, or an essay neglected because something more agreeable presented itself; but the reader himself was not pursued from paragraph to paragraph by a procession of vibrations, notifications, recommendations and miniature entertainments, each announcing with extraordinary confidence that whatever he was reading could safely be postponed.
For young readers in particular, this is not an insignificant alteration in circumstance. Social media has changed not only what they read but the conditions under which reading takes place, and perhaps even the expectations with which they approach it. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and their innumerable companions have accustomed millions of people to an astonishing abundance of information delivered rapidly, attractively and in fragments small enough to be consumed almost without effort. A video ends; another begins. A caption is read; the thumb moves. There is always something else, and it is always immediately available.
A novel is considerably less accommodating. It may spend three pages describing a room before allowing anybody to enter it; introduce a character whose purpose remains obscure for half a chapter; plant a detail on page thirty whose significance does not emerge until page two hundred; and, most offensively of all to a mind accustomed to instant novelty, occasionally expect the reader to continue without rewarding him every fifteen seconds for having done so. The difficulty is not necessarily that young people have become incapable of sustained attention, as the more apocalyptic accounts of modern technology are fond of declaring, but that sustained attention must now compete with forms of entertainment designed expressly to interrupt it.
The distinction matters. A reader who pauses every few minutes to answer a message, inspect a notification or discover why several million strangers are suddenly discussing a particular celebrity has not ceased to read; but the quality of the reading changes. The private absorption upon which long-form reading so often depends is repeatedly broken, and each return to the page requires the reconstruction of a little world which had only just begun to take shape. Characters must be remembered, arguments recovered, moods re-entered. What appears to be a momentary interruption may therefore cost rather more than the few seconds in which it occurs.