Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the 21st Century
By Federico Pianzola
2021
The open review period for this book has concluded. The authors and the MIT Press wish to thank all of our reviewers for their contributions.
It is 2021, the major social media have been around for more than a decade, increasingly being used for reading-related activities, like organizing one’s own bookshelf, discussing novels, and reading book reviews. Still, there is no publication that tried to organize the precious knowledge generated by research about digital social reading (DSR), which is scattered among many volumes, journal articles, and blog posts, intersecting many different disciplines. I tried to do it in this book. Given its broad scope, it will necessarily attract legitimate critics by different parts, from scholars that will think it does not meet specific disciplinary expectations. I think that such an interdisciplinary approach is needed to understand the social, cultural, and pedagogical aspects of DSR. Aware that a synthesis done by a single person can easily overlook even important aspects of a phenomenon, I openly share my work hoping that a community review will help to improve it and make it more useful for other researchers, students, educators, and curious readers.
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I briefly present from what perspectives DSR has been studied so far and state some of the reasons that make a thorough investigation of DSR a necessary step for the comprehension of the digital literary sphere, but also of the cognitive and aesthetic aspects of reading.
I clarify what are the subjects covered in this book, contextualizing DSR in the long history of reading and outlining its difference from traditional forms of social reading with print books.
I intervene in the debate about the use of digital technology for reading, criticizing some methodological aspects of existing research and underlining the possible benefits of DSR for individuals and for societies.
The open review period for this title will end on October 3, 2021
This publication has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 792849.
