The first seven floors of the West building at Hunter College have allocated student seating: a few large cushion chairs, a rectangle couch with little wooden spaces to place your things on, a long desk nailed to the wall accompanied by regular classroom chairs and outlets and an occasional round table. On every floor, every single open space is taken up by a student, whether it is intended to be sat on or not. Countless heads hang low with their slumped shoulders and necks aching as they diligently stare at their phone screens, tablets or laptops. This Monday afternoon, not a single person on any of the seven floors holds a book in their hand.
Gen-Z’s reputation for short attention spans and low literacy levels has been a point of discussion since the first Gen-Z person learned how to speak. The rise of TikTok and short-form content seemingly reinforces the stereotype as older generations shake their heads at the fact that the word ‘demure’ only hit Gen-Z’s vocabulary in the past month. Young people are, supposedly, just too impatient to sit through the entirety of a movie or complete a novel. However, if Marvel can break box office records with a Spider-Man film whose length is the equivalent of a commute from Brooklyn to North Jersey and back, then maybe something can be done about the reading issue. The fall semester is underway and many students are forced to read through pages upon pages of textbooks, but what about leisurely reading?
“I feel like it’s a hit or miss. You can either find a lot of Gen-Z people who read books and are obsessed with them but at the same time, there’s no way to tell if it’s the majority or minority. I think we might read more than other generations,” said student Hira Yasir, 20, an avid romance and fantasy reader. Yasir stated she read around 20 books in the past three months.
Yasir does have a point, with the rise of #BookTok, a community of readers on TikTok, it’s hard to tell whether the same numbers line up outside of online spaces. Barnes & Noble is one example of the online world influencing the physical one as ‘Trending on TikTok’ sections can be found in almost every store.
“Nowadays, with TikTok and everything, I feel like we are just more used to animated versions instead of actually reading something in a book or anything. What I do sometimes is read manga, it’s not necessarily reading something, but yeah,” said student Ashley Harris.
Harris has not read any books in the past three months and shared that she generally reads more during the academic year due to her classes. Harris is not alone; a lot of Hunter students have the same reading habits. They’re not avid readers, maybe they occasionally pick up a book, but it’s not something they consider a hobby. What’s clear is that young people have more interest in multimedia experiences and traditional reading is behind in that category.
“Hunter students are like students everywhere. I think the decline in reading is nationwide,” said Marlene Hennessy, a Hunter College professor who teaches introductory and upper-level English courses.
Hennessy recommends Homer, Chaucer, or Shakespeare as authors every Hunter student should read, but most students upon hearing that would feel intimidated. To understand and appreciate classics young people need to get in the habit of reading them, but they’re so inexperienced with the language of older books that they don’t even start.
“Perhaps people were being introduced to books the wrong way, and need to be given more choices to find what appeals to them in and about literature,” said student Zuzanna Maziarz, 20, a literary fiction and fantasy reader.
Changing the perception around reading could help resolve the issue. Not every book one reads needs to be an acclaimed classic, reading can just be a form of entertainment the way any other media is.
Not all Gen-Z Hunter students read books for entertainment, but they all read something. Students are interested in manga, psychology journals, audio and video stories, Reddit posts, and TikTok story times. The standard form of reading might be falling out of fashion with some, but an interest in listening to a good story is still a need that young people seek to fulfill.
