Researching the Social.. Or Socializing the Research

Trying to research on a social platform instead of using traditional resources has been a bit of a strange difference for me. It makes researching quite a bit more fun when it's on a social platform rather than mindlessly flipping through volume 43 of 105 of the complete works of who knows what to find a paragraph with some statistic to put into a boring paper that no one but my professor will ever read.

So naturally to start of my research I went to Twitter. Because I have a strong belief that Twitter has the answers to all.

I tried to focus first on Goodreads, Amazon, and book reviews. And there's so much information and people talking about these things! So many people are so interested in why reviews matter, and how they further books along. I also found a lot of discussions from authors talking about these saying that reviews are one of the most important parts of their books as they're what move people to read their books. I also poked around by searching for the terms digilit and digiliteracy. I thought I was being super clever when I came up with that term, but it's actually something that is really picking up speed and has apparently been around for a while. There's digiliteracy groups out there and their goals are to get iPads to students to further reading, or pushing for different and new reading apps and groups online. There's forums about reviving old classics in the new digital age and the way that digital is actually helping out libraries. There's SO much out there already, and I'm interested to see what else there is!


I then took to Facebook asking about why people think online book reviews matter. I hope for more feedback, but I did get a SUPER good response from an author that I know. I was so grateful for her response and she brought up some good points on why reviews matter to authors as well as the readers and how different people can use them. I'm very excited for her opinions as an author as well as a friend.

I still have some work to do, and there's still so much more to find on these topics. I'm actually very surprised by how popular these topics are!