Lifestyles of the “Alpha Generation”, Reading Experiences and Visual Culture: An Interpretive and Biographical Analysis of Reading Among Youth in Contemporary Brazil

We live in an accelerated society, states Harmut Rosa (2019). Combined with acceleration, contemporary society is also characterized by individualization. According to Ulrich Beck, “individualization means that people’s biographies become independent of pre-established determinations, open, available, and become a task to be performed by each individual” (Beck, 2010, p.199). In the process of individualization, the subject becomes “the center of the biographical process” while family ties and class differences occupy “the background” (Beck, 2010, p.194). Beck also states that the individual “designs his or her own biography”, that is, the “socially predetermined biography is transformed into a biography made and to be made by each individual” (Beck, 2010, p.199). Given this scenario, the precocity in the search for identity within society is understandable (Santos, 2015, p.404). The increasingly younger individual seeks his identity, his lifestyle, his self-definition within his social group. In other words, the individual's singularity is gradually and prematurely demanded, which must be confirmed in his daily life. The text addresses the interpretation of the biographical experiences of members of the so-called “Alpha generation” (born after 2010) in order to understand their lifestyles, especially regarding the practice of reading, based on reconstructive biographical narrative interviews and on discussion groups with adolescents in Brazil between 12 to 14 years old. The text provides a summary of the results of this study conducted with a diversity of youth, from the middle class, but also with indigenous youths, as well as with adolescents from urban peripheries and inhabitants from Quilombos (communities initiated by former slaves that scaped from slavery). The focus on the biographical discussion will be around the role played by visual components for the reading practice among these youths in contemporary Brazil.