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Home Page Data Vizualizations Examples Critique by Design Final Project I Final Project II Final Project III

We all can read, so why don’t we? Let’s pick a book today!

Background

This topic started with me noticing that I do not read as much as I used to when I was younger. That made me think why that has been. Of course, I have more responsibilities now, as I am finishing up graduate school. Before that, I was a working professional for 3 years. “Not having the time to read” is a valid answer if someone asks me, but I think another culprit in this equation is the effect social media has had on my life in terms of hogging my attention.

Here’s my weekly average Instagram (my most used social media application) usage:

This shows that I spend an average of 100 minutes on Instagram daily, which is 36,500 minutes per year. Which is alarming on its own.

Retrospectively, I mapped out how many books I have read since I was 16 years old. Here’s the graph:

This shows I personally have read less as I have aged.

Simple math here:

If I remember correctly, it used to take me around 600 minutes to read a 300-page book. Therefore, in 36500 minutes that I spend on Instagram, I should have read close to 60 books. And this is just Instagram. There are other apps that I use as well. Even if I am being generous to myself and considering I won’t spend all my free time on reading, I should have read at least 15 books, but I just read 3. It won’t be wrong to point out that the time I spend on social media has affected my attention, and there is a relationship between reading habits and social media usage.

Project Outline

My aim with this story is to explore whether similar patterns appear among a larger group of people between the ages of 16 and 35. I want to understand how reading habits and behaviors in late teens and adults are shaped by the current boom in social media and the clever, attention-grabbing content designed to keep us scrolling.

It would also be valuable to see how people maintain their reading routines today. The rising popularity of audiobooks and e-books compared to physical books may reveal how the medium influences the amount of reading we actually do.

Finally, I hope to examine which social media platforms are most popular and how each one triggers different emotions to keep users engaged. The functionality and sentiment behind these applications often determine how, and how much, we interact with them.

User Story:

As a person aged between 16–35, I want to balance my social media use with reading so that I can gain knowledge and form my own ideas directly rather than passively consuming curated content.

Initial Sketches

My story starts with the background of this idea, as shown above, and then dives into finding whether this trend holds up with a larger set of people or not.

The very first step is to visualise the data that shows the number of books read between the ages of 16 and 35, along with the time spent on social media among this age bracket

Now, to be comprehensive, it would be beneficial to see how people are interacting with other media of reading audiobooks or e-books instead of physical books. This will help us better estimate the current pattern of reading among individuals.

To get into the details of social media usage. It would be important to see which platforms are most dominant among the targeted age group, as this would help us understand where attention is being spent.

Finally, it would be interesting to see how these platforms interact with users and keep them engaged by curating experiences and content that evoke emotions such as happiness, fuel anxieties, etc., which makes users spend more time on the platform than they initially intended to. Therefore, the “doom scrolls” or going into “rabbit holes” is very common.

Another way of depicting the same information could be a heat map.

The Data

Name URL Description
Social Media Usage and Emotional Well-Being Social Media Usage The Dataset captures information on population demographics and their social media usage and the emotional state of users when they use a particular application
Reading habit Dataset Reading Habits The dataset contains user demographics and the number of books they have read in 12 months. Additional engagements with audiobooks and e-books are also elaborated

For this project, I will be using two primary datasets that together help explore the relationship between reading habits and social media usage among individuals aged 16 to 35. The first dataset, Social Media Usage and Emotional Well-Being, will help me capture not only how much young adults interact with various platforms but also how those platforms shape their emotional experience, be it happiness, sadness, or anxiety. These emotional patterns are especially important in understanding why users continue to return to platforms and how their time online accumulates into long-term habits such as doom-scrolling or falling into algorithmic “rabbit holes.”

The second dataset, the Reading Habit Dataset, will allow me to evaluate how reading habits vary within my target age group and whether certain reading formats correlate with increased or decreased overall reading time. By analyzing audiobook and e-book engagement alongside traditional reading, I can better differentiate whether people are replacing reading with digital content—or simply shifting the medium through which they consume books.

My plan is to integrate insights from both datasets to explore whether high social media usage corresponds to lower reading activity. I also plan on examining which social media platforms dominate attention within this age group and how emotional responses differ across them. These insights will guide the visual story I will build. Starting from my personal experience, widening the lens to population-level patterns, and ultimately revealing how digital engagement might be reshaping the reading behaviors of an entire generation.

Method and Medium

Using Kaggle as the data source, Tableau as the visualization tool, and Shorthand to flesh out my entire story. This will help me bring forward quantitative insights with a narrative flow. This combination will support an accessible, visually engaging story that shows how modern reading behaviors have changed in this digital era.

References

AI acknowledgements

I also want to acknowledge the use of Microsoft Copilot in helping me structure my ideas more coherently.