Bad Habits on Goodreads?

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter presents some findings from work on the social reading site and Amazon subsidiary, Goodreads. It aims to connect the reception-oriented strains of literary studies to positive psychology and well-being studies by way of three questions. The first is methodological and concerns a basic challenge in the empirical social sciences that has made its way into literary studies via digital humanities: how to build datasets adequately representative of such a vast and varied field of practice as reading. The second is a sociological question, arising out of work that began in the 1990s: whether there has been a general shift of cultural values such that readers are encouraged to adopt open and tolerant habits of reading, replacing the ideal of narrowly “good taste” with that of eclecticism, and establishing creative curation as the basis of a genuinely happy and healthy relationship to books. The third question links the other two by asking whether digital platforms such as Goodreads, besides being rich sources of data about readers and reading, might themselves, through their ever more comprehensive algorithmic mediations, be affecting this entire scheme of values, preferences, and readerly well-being.