The Re-mediation of the Reading Experience

Abstract

The reading practices have been experiencing some changes in their core. Book mediation has been involved in several dilemmas since the advent of the internet and the digitized word. Some predictions towards the future of the printed book are catastrophic while others neglect to see the beneficial attributes of the digital format. The word out there is not final yet, it cannot be; but what is lacking is a remembrance of both phenomena. If these changes are radical or an organic development of the book itself, it is yet to be determined.

The aim of this research is to describe how Goodreads.com readapts the emotional aspect of literary reading through the digital media. I intend to prove that the digital materiality of the phenomenal book in Goodreads.com is designed as a continuation of the sensorial and visual specificity of the printed book, and to describe how the social media aspect of Goodreads.com, might permeate the futility of the material adaption from print to digital in the user’s emotional response to the literary reading in the platform. Using a mixture of social and media theory focused on the act of reading, and using the grounded theory methodology, I will try to depict the combined experience of reading literature on a web platform as well as the reading and social implications of being immerse in a social media device as a reader.