Reading Identities, Informational WellBeing
What BookTok Teaches Us About Flourishing with Knowledge
Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information | December 27, 2025, Vol. 3, Issue 74
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter exploring how our love of information and connections can help us all thrive, individually and collectively. This is one of the places where we’re pioneering a positive, evolutionary, social and cultural psychology of information, a living lab, avant-garde research.
If this is your first time, we’re glad to have you here. We began 2025 with Information Literacy at 50 (open access) but you can go back further for essays on Infophilia and the Dopamine Connection, Infophilic Information Styles, and Artificial Intelligence.
📌 Cite & support: We provide previews and occasional free issues to keep our writing accessible; students can ask for free access, and anyone who can’t afford a subscription may request a complimentary one. If you find value here, please cite the original and consider upgrading. This serial is sustained by reader support and proper attribution rather than by copying or harvesting ideas without credit. Thank you for practicing healthy infophilia, information engagement that helps not harms.
Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2025). Reading identities, informational wellbeing: What BookTok teaches us about flourishing with knowledge. Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information, 3(74).
Signal & Noise
We opened 2025 with a photo of Natcher’s bridge (Indiana-Kentucky) in “Information Literacy at 50,” honoring Paul Zurkowski. I close 2025 with a shot of the Vincent Thomas Bridge spanning across the Port of Los Angeles at San Pedro, California. Information, like cargo, requires infrastructure—beautiful, organized, intentional.
This year marked a transformative period for Infophilia. The publication has been regularly in the top 100 of Education on Substack, peaking at #31, reflecting growing engagement with its unique insight into information and knowledge cultures. More importantly, we’ve built a community of readers who care about how people flourish with knowledge, not just how we manage it.
I’m especially grateful to paid subscribers and patrons, librarians, and others who’ve told me their stories. Your generous support makes this work possible and in these days of abundance and grievance, your belief in Infophilia sustains this work.
Shoutout & Silence
Shoutout to Brett Spencer for his work with sensory-friendly social justice in libraries. Libraries are increasingly embracing sensory-friendly practices—quiet hours, sensory kits, neurodivergent-affirming spaces. This movement parallels what today's essay explores: information environments designed for diverse bodies and minds.
Somber silence in sadness of the senseless deaths of Rob Reiner and Michelle Singer. Also, day after Christmas, reading of Memphis legend Don Bryant’s passing in rainy Southern California, the skies seemed to echo Ann Peebles’ I Can’t Stand the Rain, a widely canonized soul classic that John Lennon once praised as the best song ever. Information, like music and weather, carries grief and grace: infophilia made visible.
BookTok's reading aesthetics aren't superficial trends but survival strategies. This essay explores how Gen Z transforms reading into wellness architecture through curated identities like light academia, romantasy, and cottagecore. These practices aren't just about books—they're about regulating information for mental health, building supportive communities, and making knowledge sustainable. Just as Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) responds to toxic food systems, Gen Z's aesthetic curation responds to toxic information systems. Fifty years after Zurkowski coined "information literacy," infophilia is extending the frontier to informational wellbeing, building upon rather than replacing it.
Reading Identities, Informational Wellbeing
What BookTok Teaches Us About Flourishing with Knowledge
“In a relationship with reading” is @abbysbooks’ tagline on TikTok. She has 459.7K followers, 46.1 million likes, and one of her most popular videos—”tell me you do this too #bookworm #booktok #fyp #reading,” posted May 3, 2021—includes this gem: “consulting the imaginary camera man.”
Tell me you don’t do that. No matter your age, most people don’t just have a phone in their hand—some have an imaginary camera forever clicking selfies away. We narrate our lives as if someone’s watching. We arrange our bookshelves knowing they’ll be seen. We curate our reading moments as performances, even when we’re alone.
Some might sneer. So superficial. But no. This is survival too, and flourishing.