The Effect of Digital Age on Youth Reading Habits and practices

Purpose/In digital age, web tools work as machines that swallowing time rapidly. A new generation tendency to use these tools for entertaining and information gathering has changed their reading habits in terms of type of selected materials and reading practices. In other words, although today users receive information using internet but they have become superficial readers who have a little interest to read literature in deep from monitor. This not only changes new generation reading habits but their web browsing and information processing. The present study aims to investigate the effect of digital age on users’ reading habits.
Design/methodology/approach- Survey method was used in this study and a questionnaire used as a data collection tool. The population included all undergraduate students in all disciplines (=1000) who study in “Toos Institute of Higher Education”. 100 students were selected as a sample study based on accessibility principle.
Findings/The results indicated that the most participants believed that internet increases interactive reading (=56%), expanded reading (=44%), and superficial reading (=49%) in contrast, it reduces Concentrated reading (=34%) and in-depth reading (=28%). In addition, internet increases reading news (=63%), general knowledge (=85%), special literature (=63%), and pornography (=42%) in contrast, it has no any significant impact on religious literature (=35%) and literary literature (=40%).
Orginality/value-Since this study how young people interact with digital data examines the process and the impact of this interaction on the habits and practices of reading them the tangential direction is important.