I've been pondering something that is very sacred to me for the past couple of weeks, and though the subject matter is dear to my heart, I realized that I hadn't thought too much about it before this semester at university.

The question is this: why do I read? But really, why?

Sure, in school I have to read certain books to understand material that I will be tested on/ need to write about and I'm motivated to get good grades, but what I'm really talking about here is why do I read when it's just for me? 

 

As reading moves into the digital age and devices like the Kindle and platforms like Goodreads and Amazon are becoming ever-more prevalent and their presence ever-more felt, this is an extremely important question. It's important because when your reading life moves to social media, what does "just for me" mean? It isn't just for you anymore- you're sharing it with the world. You're sharing it with the world before you even begin to read a certain book! What motivates us to read now and what will in the future, when Goodreads and Kindle usage are undoubtedly the norm? How do we balance our social media sharing and interaction with our own genuine relationship with a text? 

In her article "Words with Friends": Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads, Lisa Nakamura raises some interesting points on this topic. She illustrates the nature of quickly growing platforms like Goodreads. There is something to be said about the digital personas we create: "Goodreads user profiles feature virtual bookshelves to be displayed to friends, creating a bibliocentric as well as an egocentric network of public reading per- formance. he site’s slogan, 'reading is more fun when shared,' emphasizes these and other pleasures of readerly sociality." So creating our digital bookshelves, similar to the bookshelves in our living rooms, etc, is becoming a way for us to say something about ourselves. My parents' living room is peppered with big, beautiful coffee-table travel books, biographies on American presidents and Latter-day Saint prophets. They really read those books every day. I don't think they planned it, but those three categories of books are a pretty accurate representation of who they are as a couple. They each have a bookshelf built in to the wall next to their side of the bed in their bedroom, and on my dad's side you'll find lots of theology books and more biographies; on mom's side, a couple memoirs, some fictitious novels, and more biographies. What differentiates a tangible bookshelf and a digital one, is that you have to be physically invited into a home to see a tangible bookshelf, and digital bookshelves are as available as your Facebook profile, depending on your privacy settings- definitely more available than a personal invitation into your home. In my mind, once you're in my house, you probably already have some kind of idea of who I am. You may judge my bookshelf, but it isn't the first thing you know about me. On platforms like Goodreads, there may be more of a danger than before of people artificially creating bookshelves to create online personas because you are strictly being judged by your readership and likes and dislikes as a reader. 

Khoi Vinh, the design director for the online New York Times from 2006 to 2010 said (as quoted by Nakamura): "It's a no-brainer to me that content consumption is going to be intimately if not inextricably linked with your social graph." So Vinh is saying that the content we choose to consume is going to be connected to our social profiles. I agree, and that's what worries me, but are contrived bookshelves any different from your usual, run-of-the-mill fakers who pretend to like and not like a lot of things besides books? Poser-ism (yes I just made up that word) is possible in all facets of life, and was already possible in the world of readership, so will it change that much online? (I really want to hear your opinion!) Nakamura continues in her article: "While Facebook ofers up our list of friends as visual evidence of our social graph, letting us create and display our connections, Goodreads foregrounds reading as a spectacle of collecting." Will the "spectacle of collecting" motivate us to read more than our own inner desire to enter into another world, think something new, learn about other people and places, learn to sympathize with fictional characters, etc? Because that is why I read, and I don't want it to change. 

The answer might be that people will continue to read for the classic reasons, but be motivated to post for different reasons. Some books are way too much of an endeavor to read just so you can post about it. What do you think?