Influencers And Reading || July 2021

     If there's something that I've noticed recently, it has been the total resurgence in reading. It's interested me a lot- apparently so much that I felt like writing a blog post all about it. 

    To give you a quick debrief of what's been happening online, the combination of influencers (such as Emma Chamberlain) and the readers/writers of TikTok (dubbed BookTok) have created a new narrative for the generation that reading for fun is actually cool and important. 

    Now, if you know me, you know that I sadly struggle with the ideologies of gatekeeping (mostly from things that end up blowing up after I've been screaming about them to people for years, but that's beside the point). But, I'm trying my hardest to not be like that with this new resurgence in reading. 

    Reading for myself, and lots of others is an escape. Reading for fun is also something that has turned into a lost art, and I think that the school systems are mostly to blame for that. Teaching kids to read to test and get a numeric grade back for how you personally interacted with the material has never been something that has sat right with me. And, as suspected, it taught kids to hate reading. Some teachers I had attempted to reverse it, but by the time they reach middle school, it's nearly impossible to get the majority of kids to pick up a book and feel the excitement that would be compared to that of a movie release. 

    But I think that within the past four months, I've noticed something. People are excited to read. 

    I actually talked about this with my mom before I even thought about writing a blog post about it, and I told her how ecstatic I was that there was this newfound coolness surrounding reading. Sure, I had a stick up my ass a little bit that people were now finding love for books that I had been geeking out in front of my English class about since, like, the seventh grade, but I also was happy that others were enjoying the same stories I had. 

    I think a lot of this has to do with the influencers, as I mentioned before. There are at least three big influencers that I can name off of the top of my head that has promoted the importance of reading for fun. Emma Chamberlain (10.4 million subscribers on youtube), Lexi Hidalgo (1.6 million followers on TikTok), and Nicole Raifee (426k subscribers on youtube) are all three influencers that have a pretty sizeable following that have made it known what books they're reading and promoting them to their audiences. 

    To be honest, it's kind of incredible. 

    This is only partnered with the help of BookTok, which has created new and innovative ways to pull people into what these stories are about, to the point where people need to know what happens next. People do their monthly wrap-ups in fifteen-second tiktoks that have people intrigued in a way that I've never seen before. 

    I feel like I should clarify that I've also been a part of the youtube version of BookTok for a long time, and I've never seen this kind of engagement before- especially from people who hadn't been reading their whole lives. 

    I see wrap-ups and book reviews on my For You Page now of people who have only been reading for one, two, or three months at most. They're excited and have such incredible feedback to give about these books. 

    And while yes, I'm sitting here a little bit upset that for a long time reading was seen as weird or irrelevant, I do appreciate all of this. It not only creates a more intellectually stimulated generation but also funds the book industry. And to even take that point further, it stimulates the book industry to push out more authors (because there are more consumers for the books). 

    This is a huge deal. Maybe I'm reading too much into this because, in the end, it formed so fast that it could leave just as quickly, but I'm hoping that there are people out there who have a whole newfound love for reading that they never knew was there. 

    Hell, I think it just makes me excited to see people enjoying the art of storytelling.