Digital Young

Another project that I have started for about 2-3 weeks: in the hall of Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, I put two bags with used books: universal & Romanian literature, literature critique. The point was book sharing. I also wrote a message: Grab a book but put one in place! The first two days, students were looking really curious but they weren’t looking into the bags to see what books were there. After that, they started to look deep into the bags and really look over them. Later, they started to do the crossing thing. But only a percentage of 40% really put a book in place, the rest only taking them and … stealing them? I will wait to see if they are stealing them or they are just reading & bringing them back.

What does this mean for me? I don’t know yet, but I will draw some conclusions out of this after more time. Now it would be too premature.

“Young people don’t read nowadays”, you can hear all around you. Well, I am really sorry for prejudiced people, but I really don’t think that is true and accurate. So I thought to make a little investigation of my own.

First step: going to selling books points and observing the frequency of young people going there and buying books. Two first observations here: it depends very much on the type of place where there were sold books. For instance, youngsters prefer to associate reading practice with the place. What does this mean concretely? Well, they were all over books in a library shop, where they could do something else and reading, then to go in a supermarket and buy books there.

Here’s an example. I think I already talked a little bit in a previous post about Carturesti. This is a library in the center of Bucharest. It is a library in an old specific Bucharest house, but which has been very nicely painted and redesigned.

And from inside:

At first floor, they have three rooms: two of them are for selling books, one is a tea saloon, where sometimes are also book launches or photos expositions. There are a lot of young people coming to drink a tea there, looking at books, reading newspapers or just meeting friends and socializing. This second photo is more special: it is the second floor, or as it is already called among youngsters “the attic”. Here, they have a place for relaxation, reading etc. There are not just books for sell, but also music cd, posters, tea and coffee tools, manga reviews and graphic albums. Here, teens come and stay for hours, just hanging out, but also reading and learning.

As for the other points of selling books, like commercial centers and supermarkets, the frequency of young people decreased dramatically and adults frequency increased very much.

A commercial center:

A supermarket:

My second finding is about how do young people choose a book. Here, a first observation is that it is a big difference between teens and college students. The first category: they come in groups, they look around a lot, they are very influenced by the opinion of their peers and they choose something that was recommended to them. College students (18-22 years old): they know already what to buy (even if it’s literature for pleasure or a class bibliography), they choose really fast and after that they just look around for new publications. I really explained myself this difference by the fact that teens have not still formed the taste for reading; they don’t know just yet what kind of literature they like, what would be their favorite author and they just scout and explore different types of literature. Two constant genres through their preferences: Victorian novel, mystery genre, and magic literature (Harry Potter etc). It seems like fantasy and thrills do have a lot of impact on them.

When talking about university students, they do have already formed their reading taste. They already know what author would they like, what authors. The recommendations that they acquire from their friends or colleagues are “hard core” novels: U. Eco, J. Joyce, Boris Vian, authors who are hard to read, but also very known and authors less known. This second type of authors is highly valued among them. To hear about a less known author and to recommend him is like recommending a good movie, but which has not been seen by everybody. What is not in mainstream, is special. Same rules applying to clothes, movies and other pop culture items, are applying also to reading practices case.

When asking them what cultural personalities would they like to recommend them a book, here I had such interesting findings. If teens choose personalities from mass-media journalists area and known (in Romania) rock singers area (like Tudor Chirila or Adrian Despot), university students came up with political personalities and well-known and media intellectuals (Liiceanu, Patapievici).

As everybody is talking about how young people read less than in the past and that their interest is getting lower and lower regarding reading, well, here’s a question: in what exactly did reading practices changeand how does that reflect a social transformation? I know that something didn’t change: the speech “youngsters don’t read so much as I used to do it when I was their age”. I would add some questions in order to change the terms of discussion: what do they read, how do they read (intimate reading versus public reading), the time they allocate to reading. If the discussion is focused on quantity, then young people have always read less than adults; and they have always ran from school bibliography; and they have always been fascinated by certain litterature genres. So, what’s new? I leave this discussion open. You can find your own aswers.