Article Featuring of Winners
1st Winner -
Ashima Syal
Title - Reading - The Lost Joy
In a day and age which is so rooted in operating mechanically that the value of what it feels to read people, places, books, seem to have completely vanished. The art of reading now is lost, the libraries just don't seem to have enough visitors in the age of social media. Social media has diversified the way reading is received. Initially people use to read books, but now they have shifted to audio books, because they find it convenient to listen, since the lifestyle of people nowadays makes them travel, the ones like reading, purchase a kindle, for they find it easy, to read while sipping coffee, or they perhaps know can pass their time on the flight while being lost in their kindle.
Social media has not only blended the reading culture with technology, it has also set a new trend of reading. People now prefer to sit in book cafes, and read. The concept of book cafes became very popular because of social media.
The reading culture, with the advent of technology has now taken a new turn. But, the question is, are people reading for the sake of reading? Where are the readers who once read for the joy of reading? Somehow, people have lost the patience of reading. Reading an actual book and a downloading a book to read, will always be different for different people. The reading habits have changed, because their attention span fades in seconds, when they are holding a book. Many have begun to treat the books as an accompaniment rather than treating it as a source of knowledge and learning. A true reader observes the world more than he observes himself, but the current reader seems too busy to observe the world, therefore chooses to hide behind the books, unable to read himself.
2nd Winner -
Mridul Ghildiyal
Title - Judging a Book by Its Feed (How Social Media had Changed What We Read)
There was an era when books were the main medium for knowledge and entertainment, from Tenali Rama's witty stories to the legendary tales of brave warriors like Rana Pratap, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Sher-e Punjab Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and Hari Singh Nalwa. Simply put, books remained a way to discover the etiquette of living and inspirational lessons. "The Diamond Sutra" is regarded as the oldest printed book in existence, having been printed using woodblock printing in 868 AD. Following that, in 1455 in the German city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the movable type printing press, printed the first book using movable metal type, now referred to as the Gutenberg Bible.
In this age of social media where every single thing is shared worldwide through just a like and a share, literature is slowly but surely reclaiming its ground. With the help of advanced technology today, traditional books have gained a new dimension through audiobooks and e-books that are widely accessible to all. Be it on a plane or in a peaceful park, surveys show that roughly eighty percent of the global population engages with these e-books and audiobooks, and this number is extremely likely to grow in the future. The clearest evidence of social media's power over reading is commercial. #BookTok, the books corner of TikTok that took off in 2020, has been credited with driving print sales to their highest level since NPD BookScan began tracking the industry in 2004, with a 9% jump in the number of books sold between 2020 and 2021. Industry watchers had never seen anything quite like it — NPD BookScan itself said no other social platform had ever moved sales numbers this way.
The primary example of Social media being a medium of marketing literature work would be Colleen Hoover's novel It Ends With Us which has been sitting quietly the shelves since 2016. The moment it found BookTok, an author who had sold roughly 237,000 books total before the platform's rise went on to sell 2.3 million copies in a single year, pushing her lifetime print total past 7 million. Similar stories played out with older titles like The Song of Achilles and They Both Die at the End — books years past their release date, suddenly back on bestseller lists purely because a video about them went viral.
BookTok is something that didn't just amplify existing bestsellers but rather, it built its own taste hierarchy and that hierarchy rewards a specific emotional shape. Successful videos typically focus on books that elicit a visible, filmable emotion, such as crying, gasping, or hurling the book across the room. Books designed for brief, powerful emotional payoffs— such as twist endings, heartache, ethically dubious relationships, and motifs that readers can recognize and seek for directly—will inevitably be elevated by a platform tailored for such payoffs. That marks a significant shift in why a book is picked up. Readers aren't necessarily perusing a shelf and discovering something surprising; they're surfing a feed for an emotional experience they've previously been promised — "enemies to lovers," "grief that will wreck you," or "read this in one sitting." The book is no more a solitary discovery, but rather a social, even performative experience, as seen by the growth of color-coded selfies and unpacking films in addition to the reading itself.
The more difficult question is whether the same platforms that encourage individuals to read books are simultaneously undermining their ability to do so. Here, the evidence is less convincing. A widely cited Nature Communications study of collective attention, which examined everything from Twitter hashtags to a century of Google Books data to decades of movie ticket sales, discovered that cultural attention is shrinking across the board, with public interest peaks becoming sharper and shorter-lived. According to psychologist Gloria Mark's research, the average sustained attention span individuals bring to a computer has dropped from roughly two and a half minutes in 2004 to less than a minute in recent years. That drop is clearly visible among teenagers the group that uses platforms the most. One study shows that less than a fifth of teens read books, magazines or newspapers each day while more than four out of five teens use social media every day – an obvious swap of one pastime for another. Another survey from 2019 revealed that only a quarter of eighteen‑year‑olds read each day. Even the surge in reading during the pandemic, which helped spark BookTok appears to have been an exception of a reversal of the main trend – a brief return to books, during lockdown built on top of a longer decline.
Neuroscientists who study reading say this is more, than a scheduling problem. The worry is not just that people pick Instagram of novels for a single hour. The worry is that the kind of attention deep reading needs— attention that is sustained, linear and low‑stimulation—is being actively removed by Social Media.
When you put these facts side by side they seem contradictory. Social media isn’t just saving reading or killing reading. In truth, they are just describing the same mechanism from two different angles. Social media has not changed the fact that people crave story, meaning or emotional catharsis. Social media has only changed the economics of how people get those things. A platform that rewards immediate and shareable content will naturally favor books that deliver a strong impact quickly and readers who can enjoy that impact in short frequent bursts. Social media is brilliant at turning an emotional reaction into a mass‑market phenomenon. Social media is less suited to nurturing slow quiet uninterrupted attention that a 700‑page literary novel or a dense nonfiction work demands. So, the books we read have shifted toward the books that are engineered and sometimes, designed deliberately. Often the writer has an instinct for what plays for the algorithm which are high‑concept hooks, emotionally loaded tropes, satisfying twists. The reason we read has partly shifted from private absorption to social participation. Reading becomes content, identity, something to perform and discuss, not something to disappear from one’s conscience. None of this means deep solitary reading is disappearing, while deep reading now has to compete, for the time with a media environment that is explicitly engineered to be more immediately rewarding.
3rd Winner -
Kadambari Gupta
Title - Social Media and its effects on reading habits
Social media is a wheel that has turned the directions of our life there hundred and sixty five degrees. Our brains have just become addicted to consuming content and not absorbing information received scrolling as an option has distributed our attention to a great extent.
Those constant notifications received the urge to hold phone in those trembling hands have made it a battle to hold a book and read a few pages. Highlights seen about others make the pen of life that we breathe move very slowly. To be able to read the phone needs to be kept away take that book and begin just with two pages small steps much easier than one giant step.
Take it as a challenge and complete it before this device and internet ruins your analytical skills. Reading is to connect with the word of a writer and somewhere find pieces of your life etched and social media makes us envy a better story of our life before the impact gets severe control otherwise your control will be lost forever.
Hindi Category Winner -
Soni Jha
सोशल मीडिया ने किस प्रकार किताब पढ़ने की कला को प्रभावित किया है
Comments
Post a Comment