I am an internet junkie myself - but I dont have any problems in reading long texts ... I regulary read whole books in a single session, and I really cannot say that anything in this regard has changed.
Perhaps people are more willing to accept "the first search result" as an answear - though I guess they always were willing to do so, only now Google makes it easier to find a trashy first answear. So I can second that "whitebread theory". Most people I know are willing to accept the first page they found (or the first page of hits) and forget to recheck their facts. As it is much easier to publish drek in the internet then it is in a book - there is a much bigger percentage of useless, made-up or dangerously wrong content in the internet. Simply taking the first five hits without questioning them critically is dangerous. As quite a number of people forgets about this - perhaps they are right.
But ntl: I fail to see that big a difference between a "real research" using Google or using a Library. You always have to recheck your information, use cross-referencing and get information about your source ... As most internet pages are unwilling to correctly quote and state their sources, cross-referencing and checking is more difficult with an internet source - but OTOH I have more sources to read
Oh and dont forget the language - the overall language in the internet is far easier (one could say degraded) then the one found in books. This leads to a generation of people not used to difficult language and not used to writing carefully. I have already seen some "study thesi" or similar written in a kind of "chat speak" - because the fellow students got to used to using this kind of language.
@Over: Yes, this is a problem. I regulary find myself doing something similar "I can always remember this later" ... Its dangerous because it leads to dependencies and to a disability to remember long stuff in the long run ..
The bigger problem seems to me Google itself. Google is filtering information, the content-sorting itself is non-trivial (and greatly influences which information is read) - and thus Google has a great power. I think people should (again) start using different search engines and not relay on a single source of information/searching. But thats a completely different chapter
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But as a whole, I guess that this is not a problem of the internet itself - but of the way it is used. If people were trained to make 'real research' - the internet would be far more valuable then it is today. Continuing to read books - though you surf - stops your reading skill from degrading. etc etc