Reading with Booktok. Young adult’s reading motivation and reading habits in online and offline contexts

Description

Booktok offers a unique insight into how young people today talk and socialize around books and collectively sustain their motivation to read. The platform can therefore provide important knowledge about how reading and literature can be meaningful for young people. However, for the individual reader, participating online also entails various forms of offline reading. While previous research has primarily examined young people’s reading in separate environments, online or offline, the integration between analogue and digital contexts remains largely unexplored. A deeper understanding of how these reading practices interact would provide new perspectives for strategic reading promotion efforts, which are currently mainly focused on analogue environments.

The project "Reading with Booktok" is designed to encompass a holistic perspective on the individual reader’s complex reading practices. The aim is to examine reading habits, reader identity, and social reading among young Swedish Booktok readers, with a particular focus on how offline and online contexts interact. The project’s data will be collected through three complementary methods. In the spring of 2026, surveys will be conducted in upper secondary school classes to provide an overall picture of how Booktok is used within this age group. This will be followed by interviews with a selection of students who actively use Booktok. At the same time, the Swedish-language segment of Booktok will be examined through digital fieldwork.

A second strand of the postdoctoral project on Booktok examines the use of tropes among romance readers on Booktok. Part of this study was published in an article for Passage (2024) and is based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The results show that tropes function both as terminology and as a conceptual framework that provides readers with a shared basis for formulating their own trope-like statements about romance novels. By incorporating humour and presenting affective readings, a considerable portion of the communication surrounding romantic tropes appears to turn inward, toward the community itself, thereby contributing to the construction and maintenance of a collective identity and a sense of belonging. Together with Sara Kärrholm (Lund University), a further publication is planned in which we examine how readers use the literary concepts of genre and tropes and the function these serve in the social reading practices on Booktok.