Nah, the article claims that the internet is causing us to lose our ability to read deeply. It's pure nonsense. Anyone that dealt with writing reports and research papers in school using, gasp, dead tree encyclopedias certainly had highly developed skimming skills, jumping around through those pages looking for the pieces they needed to complete their papers with all the required footnotes and bibliography. And then they still had to read through more dead tree novels, if they were in the appropriate english classes, thus both skill sets were needed. I do both on a regular basis still, both on and offline.
Now what might be happening is that schools today have declined to the point that students are no longer required to read those more challenging novels, and thus never develop the deeper reading skills in the first place. Given all the group-think "learning" now in schools, this is quite easy to believe, and the blight (and savior) that is Cliff notes and the like along with mostly average teachers. It takes a great teacher to get students to actually read some of the admittedly dredge crap (Dostoyevsky, I'm looking at you for one) which at best is unpleasant reading and write about something that cannot be gleaned out of those abridged notes. There's many others, but it will vary by reader, which is why literature is such a great thing. Someone will love the Canterbury Tales, others will not be able to tolerate reading it by choice, Beowulf? Steinbeck? Hemingway? Bronte (any of the three)? But without exposure to the actual works, and the effort to absorb them, most will never know. (FYI - I threw in a mixture of authors and works considered classics that should prove challenging to any student to read that's not already read other peer works, I make no voucher of my opinion of any but Crime and Punishment, of which I feel I was sentenced without committing a crime...)
