It is the season of book fairs and litfests. No less than eight major book fairs and 10 literary festivals take place across India in the month of January. The largest-visited book fair in the country, indeed all of Asia — the International Kolkata Book Fair — opened in the city this week and is expecting to draw well over two million people. But are visitors to these events readers in the conventional sense? The question is not irrelevant. At a time and in a global culture where attention is currency, reading is increasingly acquiring a performative edge and is being used to signal intellectual heft, especially on social media. The book, thus, is no longer just something that is to be read: it has become something to be displayed, flaunted, thereby functioning as a lifestyle prop and signal for public consumption on social media. There is hard evidence to suggest the rise of what is now called ‘performative reading’. For instance, data from NielsenIQ BookData show that while the sale of physical books has increased in countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom and even in India, the number of people who read for pleasure has dropped, as has the amount of time spent on reading. What is more, the rise in book sales is often driven by prominent authors or by those who trend on social media.
Social media — that usual suspect — has played a disproportionate role in transforming reading from pleasure to performance. ‘Bookstagramming’ — the ritual of reading out passages from books or reviewing books online — has, tellingly, become a force in book marketing: designers these days make book covers bolder and colourful, packing in more information for this very tribe. But there is a cultural signalling as well. An image or a post of a person surrounded by a neat pile of books and a steaming mug, or posing before a bookshelf, suggests cerebral depth and an intellectual life. None cares to find out if these books are actually read by this supposed lover of a life of ideas.
However, such is the dominance of performative reading that it often creates false binaries. The café reader is treated with suspicion, for instance, because it is assumed that his choice of reading in public is a strategic, as opposed to being an organic, act. Even those reading on public transport — a practice that predates social media rituals — can no longer evade similar scrutiny. Moreover, not everything about the act of reading online ought to be dismissed. After all, in the modern, fragmented, disjointed world, online reading groups can offer an effective substitute for the diminishing culture of informal literary conversations and book clubs. Most important, books are not inert creatures; they cast a spell. So even the performative reader has the hope of transitioning into a serious one at some point in time. Reading, whether private or social, is immensely valuable as long as a book is being read and not skimmed through for the sake of appearance.