Week 9 -- Readers & Writers Love Social Reading

Medium, logo.

I thought the social reading article was of particular interest for me as a writer. Over the past few months, I've been questioning the amount of reading I've done. Underworld sits by my bedside, unread past the 220 page mark since the beginning of the year. The novel is huge and requires focus with its intertwining storylines and lyrical prose. Would this book be enhanced by social reading?

I think so. The ~1000 page behemoth has nuggets of clarity hidden in every page. I'd certainly find the reading rewarding if I could read other's discussions on certain passages and analysis of characters as I read. It'd be like a crowdsourced Sparknotes as you read. When I was in high school, before the Ebook phenomenon really took off with the iPad, I frequented literature forums on The Literature Network, a place where you could get eBooks of the classics. I loved reading people's thoughts on the great works of literature, even if I hadn't read a certain book I could still listen in and gain something either for my novel writing or for general knowledge.

With the availability of the classics in public domain, eBooks, as the social reading article notes, I believe there will be an explosion of this kind of discussion. I'm optimistic, I hope even more people will read these books now that they can be freely acquired. Reading books in isolation can only bring so much insight on a novel, I argue so much more can be gained outside of your reading by looking at what others have to say.

In addition to social reading, with forums and social media, social writing is becoming prevalent across the web. The best example of this that I've seen is the site Medium, currently in beta, that has line-by-line comments. With each paragraph, or even line, users can leave their comments in relation to that particular passage. Medium calculates any piece of writing that you post based on word count and estimates how long someone would take to read a piece. With regard to a writer, what is more important than hits is who's actually read your piece. As such, Medium splits your traffic into the amount of hits, then the amount of people who have read (or scrolled with the mouse) to the bottom of your piece. For readers, Medium shows how many people back a certain piece by recommending it and adding to people's collections. That way, clickbait headlines are lessened as they won't have as many recommendations on the article.

Something over the past week that amazed me with Medium was after years of barely receiving more than 50 views, I posted an article at 5am about procrastination. Within a day, the piece had gained enough traction on the site from recommendations (17, as opposed to the 2-3 most pieces get) and this 'social reading' had given even the Medium staff knowledge of it. They posted the piece in their "Editor's Picks" collection and a tweet out on their official Twitter, and the next day I had over 800 views. To this day I'm still receiving full reads of the piece.

Social reading in action, folks. It benefits both writers and readers.

Reference:

Moore, D. (2012, July 29). Social reading: Fad or future?. Post on Darcy Moore’s Blog. Retrieved from http://darcymoore.net/2012/07/29/social-reading-fad-or-future/

Image:

T., Sam. (2013). Between tweets and longreads: A happy medium [Image]. Retrieved from http://ucwbling.chicagolandwritingcenters.org/what-is-medium-twitter-long-reads/