The Sociality of Reading Together: How Hybrid Literacy Infrastructures Reader’s Literacies and Identities

• In Event: Exploring Digital Platforms, Literacy Practices, and Pedagogical Futures from Diverse Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores people’s reading identities within collective reading spaces and across hybrid literacy infrastructures. Crisis narratives about reading (Agosto, 2022; Comber & Cormack, 1997; Gee, 2015) often obscure the vibrant, socially grounded reading practices that exist across digital (e.g., Instagram, TikTok) and community-based spaces (e.g., bookstore, school library). This research examines how readers’ practices across social media, bookstores, and libraries are informed by inherited infrastructures in a postdigital age.

Theoretical Frameworks
Grounded in sociocultural theories of literacy (Gee, 2015; Heath, 1983; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011; Street, 1984), this study conceptualizes reading as socially situated. This study also draws from the concept of social infrastructure (Klinenberg, 2018; Mattern, 2014), which attends to the material, institutional, and relational scaffolds that shape participation. Social infrastructures include both place-based spaces (e.g., schools, libraries, bookstores) and the more algorithmically mediated systems that shape literacies in postdigital life, where the digital is not separate from, but embedded in, daily life (Fawns, 2019; Jandrić et al., 2018; Knox, 2019).

Methods, Data Sources, & Analysis
This qualitative portraiture study (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) employs a multi-sited design across three reading communities: #Bookstagram/#BookTok, an independent bookstore, and a high school library where students participate in a librarian-run book club. The hybrid ethnographic methods emphasize the interplay between digital and physical contexts (Przybylski, 2021). The data sources included: 1) semi-structured interviews with readers, educators, and community members, 2) observational field notes, 3) artifacts (e.g., Instagram posts, TikTok videos, reading displays, event flyers), and 4) researcher memos and analytic reflections.
Data analysis is ongoing, using an iterative, inductive coding process, with particular attention to patterns in language, visuals, and relational practices within and across the sites (Heath & Street, 2008; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Stake, 1995). Further analysis emphasizes portraiture’s focus on aesthetic whole and resonance, highlighting participants’ meaning-making and identity work. This analytic orientation treats each site as a socially mediated ecology where identities are co-constructed and where practices are influenced by platformed, institutional, and community forces.

Results
Preliminary findings suggest that reader identity is shaped through layered, collective practices across spaces where readers actively construct and perform reading identities through aesthetic, affective, and relational practices. Digital platforms shape what counts as visible, valuable, or ‘successful’ reading, often privileging certain genres, bodies, or styles. Bookstores and libraries offer different affordances for participation, recognition, and material engagement compared to exclusively digital spaces. There are tensions between personal reading identities and dominant educational or algorithmic discourses about what kinds of reading, readers, and stories are valued.

Significance
This paper contributes to evolving conversations around postdigital literacies by conceptualizing reading as a socially and infrastructurally mediated practice. It complicates crisis narratives about reading today by foregrounding the agentive, communal, and infrastructural dimensions of reader identity work in and across hybrid spaces. Echoing the 2026 theme’s call to reimagine research as a site of ‘futuring’, this study is attuned to how literacy spaces like #Bookstagram/#BookTok, independent bookstores, and school libraries are not just present-tense contexts, but also historically informed and future-shaping infrastructures.

Author

• Maggie Bryant, Baylor University