There’s this common chatter all around that Gen Z doesn’t like to read anymore. These people born starting in 1997 to 2010 barely read and it might get even worse with people born after 2010 to last year. These so-called digital natives are often characterized to be glued to their smartphone and devices that owning a physical book feels like an ancient practice.
Recently, I had the chance to mingle with Gen Z and Alpha and tried to understand where they were coming from, especially to try to understand their obstacles to reading. I myself am an older gen Z but because I’ve grown around people who like to read, I certainly had a confirmation bias. So, it was why I ventured outside my comfort zone, asked around from people of my age but also the next generation on their reading interest and their challenges.
There was this one question asked to me. “ Well, what about you, what’s your reason to read?”
I felt like a grandma telling all the reasons why I started to read and my schooling was two decades ago. Without reading, I don’t think I would be here, I don’t think I would know many things and learned wisdom from the previous generation or the history. Not only that, it asks us to reflect and stop, even to the point of ditching our gadgets for a while to read a physical book.
Long story short, from the conversation, I actually learned that most of them like to read manga, manhua or manhwa. They like written words that have illustrative works to it more than works that are purely written in text.
Where I am from, Indonesia, our reading interest is considered to be the lowest in the world. Our people just don’t like to read but they are pretty active on all social media. It’s strange isn’t it? There were dozens of pieces of data supporting the argument that the people don’t like to read. However, recently I read a journal that argues and in its conclusion, Gen Z still likes to read. The only thing that is different is certainly the medium that is used to read a book. So, I suppose there is interest but a bit too low, more than some other countries whose people like to read by default.
It’s perhaps purely anecdotal that I also find similar problems happening all over these days. Perhaps, we no longer have the attention span needed to actually sit down and enjoy things. It’s probably why Manhwa and the likes gained more popularity as it has illustrative arts and the words tend to be shorter.
Honestly, I don’t know if there’s a difference in terms of the benefits gained from reading purely written text to illustrative books. I suppose sometimes some of us tend to be quite elitist about it and we have some type of judgment to those only reading comics, mahua or manhwa. But from what I learned having to talk to these people is that time has changed and it’s time to move forward.
It’s not that Gen Alpha and Gen Z don't like to read, it’s just that the medium that they prefer is something different from what we used to know. So, I guess, I would imagine more books having graphical illustration rather than purely containing words that bore these two generation.
In times when AI can be trained to write the most basic things and mold us to have some basic personalities, I think reading and reading comprehension is a good thing to have. It really saddened me that some people even in this community are using AI to write something that should be personal.
In my opinion, reading is a journey and it is personal. It doesn’t ask us to be perfect, to be grammatically correct and to not have logical fallacy or errors. Rather what makes it valuable is the journey that we take to finally come to a conclusion after reading something. Certainly it is not something tangible but it’s sad that maybe one day in the future, we’re so deeply reliant on AI that it even helps us make decisions for us.
I also advocate that reading isn’t really a challenge. It’s not about how many books you read in a month, a year or a day. I fell into this trap back in the day but these days I read whenever I can and want. It doesn’t matter if I read 5 books in a week, a book in a year but what mattered to me was that those were things I wanted to learn and read. I even talked about it all really starting with a minute, two that could ripple into an entire hour dedicated to reading.
In the end, I learn that it’s not that my generation or gen alpha hates/dislike reading. It’s just what they read that are different and their preferences too. Interestingly, that made me wonder why even in this book community, manga and comics are rarely found despite that’s what most Gen Z and Gen Alpha read these days.
Extra reference Gen Z Digital Reading Issues
