Reading as Lived: an exploration of youth reading experiences across physical and digital domains.

This research studied how the lived experience of reading among young people is transforming as a result of digital technologies. The objective was to address the societal panic around declining youth reading habits by claiming that they are founded on adult-centric conceptions of reading. To this end, dominant discourses in children’s literary and reading theory were deconstructed and reconstructed across different frames— Access, Value, and Language— in order to reassess their relevance within the modern context of reading experiences that are intertwined with digital technologies. This was conducted through five phenomenological interviews with American teens aged 13 to 18-years-old, which sought to reveal their lived reading experiences across physical and digital domains. Findings showed that young people are reading despite dominant public discourse, and that the contemporary concept of reading is evolving. These reading experiences are integrated across physical and digital domains, driven by compulsions to customise and exert agency over the reading experience, and are increasingly ephemeral through the mutability of digital languages. The implications for the publishing industry are a need to reorient digital strategy towards proactively curating products that match these transforming reading experiences, calling on publishers to look past the technology and into the intricate ways technology is reshaping established ideologies of reading. This research fills a gap in the literature on youth reading and children’s literature which fails to incorporate their own experiences into its theorisations, highlighting the need to appreciate a plurality of reading experiences. Future research can expand on these ideas through the incorporation of parental perspectives in youth reading, building out the contextual elements of their experiences further, and focus groups where publishing offerings can be tested to match the experiential elements of digital reading experiences. It can also benefit from the inclusion of ethnographic methods of observation, which fell outside the scope of this study.