Is Bookstagram the new fast fashion? It has turned reading into a performance

Indiscipline, poor food and clothing choices to even their lack of interest in libraries, parents love blaming their children’s habits on social media consumption. Starting their accusations with the overused phrase, ‘back in our day…’, parents waste no time on reflecting, quite mournfully, on the only form of entertainment they knew – reading. A joy they perhaps consider lost on their kids. Except their children haven’t abandoned reading. They just express their interest through the mediums they understand best: Instagram reels and posts. A world most boomers are absent from. A world where all the new reading is going on, though at an express pace.

The #Bookstagram community came alive during the Covid-19 pandemic, when millions of people either started a reading journey or simply returned to it. Videos and posts compiling aesthetically annotated books, the latest recommendations, and explosive reactions to trending titles began flooding Instagram. Suddenly, reading was the viral hashtag, quickly overtaking renegades and Fortnite dance trends.

In the last few months, the Instagram community has received a lot of flak. It has been accused of romanticising the act of reading instead of critically engaging with literature. Another charge levied on the community is their understanding of the literature they are consuming. The comment sections reveal that there’s no room for nuance or disagreement with the popular sentiment. One cannot share a differing perspective on a trending book for fear of being flooded with hate comments about their views. A more recent take is that the reading culture promoted by Bookstagram shares certain patterns with the oft-criticised fast fashion culture.

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Shein jackets replaced by cover jackets

“Is BookTok the new fast fashion?” asks @kaelyngraceapple on Tiktok, where this bibliophile community is tagged under #booktok.

Videos showcasing glistening hardcover books or artsy floor-to-ceiling bookshelves certainly lend weight to the above question. The parallels that emerge between these two trends become alarmingly similar when one looks at the emphasis on quantity over quality. Book hauls rarely sport well-written titles, featuring Mills-&-Boons-esque young adult romance instead.

Fashion content creator Mina Le, in a video essay about fast fashion on YouTube, talks about how creators are pushed to buy more clothes and create more outfits at an inorganic pace to feed the algorithm and remain trending. This leads to overspending on clothing just to remain relevant. This pressure is also seen on the Bookstagram side of social media platforms, where readers read through books and novels at inhumane speeds to keep up with the algorithm. This isn’t a sustainable practice – economically, environmentally or intellectually.

And all of this is fast translating into action on the part of the followers. What’s worse is that they get overwhelmed by the influencer act and live with a sense of underachievement — “I am not reading enough.”

In an app that is constantly updating and throwing stimulation of all kinds at its users, Bookstagram used to be a space for slower and more intentional engagement with the media around. It has now lost that charm and has made reading a performance that readers – and their pockets – can hardly keep up with. Not taking a leaf out of this book.

Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)