Modern sociocultural and digital practices for increasing youth reading activity

The article discusses the current possibilities of stimulating reader activity through the use of modern socio-cultural and digital practices in the context of digital transformations of the 21st century. The research is based on the idea of a new portrait of the modern reader («reader - consumer - user»). The purpose of the study is to test productive practices for increasing the reading activity of young people in the digital space. In this regard, was made an attempt to quickly fix and introduce effective mechanisms to increase the readership activity of the youth of the Southern Urals on the example of the socio-cultural practice of cultural and educational orientation - a literary competition and a reader’s challenge. For this purpose, the International Competition of Readers dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian writer Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov was implemented on the site of the official group in Contact «Philologists of SUSU» (616 subscribers). The aim of the competition was to maintain interest in reading and expand the boundaries of the readers’ horizons of students through acquaintance with the works of the poet of the 19th century. To participate in the open Internet voting, the entries were placed in a group in Contact with three posts. During the voting period, the number of live reactions was counted in the contest posts: likes, votes, comments, reposts. When determining the effectiveness of the chosen practice of stimulating reading activity (literary competition), a research approach was applied to calculate the engagement rate (ER) based on coverage (a quantitative indicator of users who were interested in the publication). The choice of this technique is due to the ability to take into account the reactions of third-party users of the competition site (social network VKontakte), who are not subscribers of the group, but who have the ability to interact with its content. The presented analysis of the audience engagement ratio ER made it possible to determine the effectiveness of the tested practice of increasing readership.