Editing Research/new digital reading experiences (section)

== INTRODUCTION ==

Looking back at the Elective, we realized that the students’ creative approaches and reading habits revealed surprising insights into how Gen Z interacts with text on screens. Their experiments highlighted the potential of design to guide attention, convey tone, and make reading more engaging — lessons that naturally informed the next phase of our research.

Reading today is shaped not only by traditional formats like books but increasingly by digital and social media environments, where content is short, interactive, and visually engaging. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have introduced new ways of presenting text—through motion, emphasis, and typographic play—that capture attention quickly and encourage performative reading. Generation Z exhibits distinctive reading behaviors that embrace such text presentations. While they may spend less time on traditional reading, they engage heavily with them, suggesting that design and presentation play a critical role in motivating engagement.

While these techniques are well-studied for short-form content, it remains unclear whether they can enhance engagement with longer texts without compromising comprehension or reading comfort.

This insight, combined with findings from our initial research project, led to the following research question:

'''''Can Social-Media-inspired text design apply to long reads content?'''''

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