I'd have to see more evidence. It's one thing to scan an article for a piece of information, another to approach a book the same way. Do people really read books the same way that they would read a blog entry? The article has a couple anecdotes, but that isn't evidence.
Quote:
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Ramesh Kurup noticed something even more troubling. Working his way recently through a number of classic authors — George Eliot, Marcel Proust, that crowd — Kurup, 47, discovered that he was having trouble reading long sentences with multiple, winding clauses full of background information. Online sentences tend to be shorter, and the ones containing complicated information tend to link to helpful background material.
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Did anyone really read Proust in the first place? These type of articles seem to imagine a past where everyone was reading serious classics where commas and semicolons were purchased in bulk quantities. Has the material that was actually was actually widely read changed much? We don't need to go back to Proust, if online reading has changed the content, the test is easy. Just take randomly selected books from 20-30 years ago, and compare them to books today. 20 years ago, few people were online. Has sentence construction become simplified over this time frame?