Creating a Space for “Lowbrow” Information Behavior: From Dime Novels to Online Communities

Paths to transformation across contemporary reading practices: The role of motivations and genre preferences.

“…Indeed, the line that supposedly separates “serious works of art” that are only fully intelligible to academics, from the “discount culture” of the masses, is a purely sociocultural construction (Swirski & Vanhanen, 2017). This is particularly detrimental, as disregarding genre fiction and digital reading practices when investigating the current cultural panorama can only result in an incomplete picture that tends to marginalize all forms of reading that don’t fall under the “literary reading” label (Floegel et al, 2020). The present study tackles this gap in research with a systematic comparison between readers of books (in print and e-books) and two digital-born reading practices: digital fiction (e.g., hypertext, interactive fiction, and visual novels), and Wattpad (the most popular digital storytelling platform), in which we tried to answer the question whether why we read (in terms of motivations for reading) and what we read (in terms of different reading practices and genre preferences) relate to how reading affects our lives.…”