🤖 AI Summary
**要旨（日本語）**
デジタル機器の普及が読書を壊滅させたという「読書の死」説は、実際のデータと照らし合わせると過大評価されている。社会心理学者アダム・マストロイアニは、以下の点を指摘している。
1. **販売・書店の実態は好調**
- 2025年の書籍売上は2019年を上回り、パンデミック期に近い水準。
- 米国では2023年にだけでも422店の独立書店が新規オープンし、Barnes & Noble も復調の兆し。
2. **読書量の統計は微減程度**
- Gallup の調査では、年間11冊以上読む「メガリーダー」が1‑5冊に減少したが、過去30年で大きなトレンドは認められない。
- National Endowment for the Arts のデータは、読者率が2012年の55％から2022年は49％へわずかに低下。
- American Time Use Survey でも2003〜2023年の読書時間はやや減少。
3. **デジタル依存の伸びは鈍化**
- ソーシャルメディア利用はピークを過ぎ、時間は減少傾向。
- アプリ開発者はユーザーの注意を引き続けるのが難しくなっている。
4. **読書は過去のメディア侵入を乗り越えてきた**
- ラジオ、テレビ、インターネット、TikTok などの登場にもかかわらず、紙の文字への欲求は残存。
- 最も中毒性の高いデバイスを持つ人々でも、時折デバイスをオフにして本を手に取ることは「奇跡的」だ。
結論として、読書の衰退は「大きな問題」かどうかは個人の評価次第であり、今後も停滞か回復の可能性があるとマストロイアニは主張している。ニュースヘッドラインが描く「読書の死」は、実際の統計と比べて過度に悲観的である。
Has the rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies really shattered our attention spans and driven books out of our culture? Maybe not, argues social psychologist Adam Mastroianni (author of the Substack Experimental History):
As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for "bad thing go up" than we do for "bad thing go down." Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; at least 422 new indie shops opened in the United States last year alone. Even Barnes & Noble is cool again.
The actual data on reading, meanwhile, isn't as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don't find any other major trends over the past three decades. Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in the percentage of U.S. adults who read any book in 2022 (49%) compared to 2012 (55%). And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023. Ultimately, the plausibility of the "death of reading" thesis depends on two judgment calls. First, do these effects strike you as big or small...? The second judgment call: Do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse...?
There are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media — time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren't sticking around for it... Fact #2: Reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it's more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok — none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper... It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead.
The author mocks the "death of reading" hypothesis for implying that all the world's avid readers "were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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