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Confirmation bias is a powerful thing, and it is easy to be mislead by it. It leads you so accept uncritically things that seem to confirm your bias and to not examine anything that might contradict it.
We have anecdotes from people in their 40's that they don't have the patience for long, convoluted text that they used to, and conclude from this that this is a result of reading online. Alternative explanations are ignored: Perhaps when people get older, they lose patience with long, convoluted text, or perhaps they never really did have that much patience with it. Tests of the hypothesis are ignored.
We also have claims from some English professors that students can't read the classics. Alternative explanations are ignored: Were students of the past really that much more inclined to reading the classics, or is this just another instance of shaking of the fist at the younger generation? Such shaking of the fist does go back thousands of years, after all. Jane Austen seems to be at least as popular as ever, so people are reading at least some classics. The convoluted writing of some writers of the 19th century was out of favor long before the internet came about. The more time passes, the less accessible the writers of the past become. That has nothing to do with the internet, it simply is easier to read something written in a style you are familiar with, and the older a work is, the more the style differs from what is common today.
There is an anecdote of someone reading a book, discussing it at a group, and discovering that there were parts that went right over her head. From this, the author concludes that it must be skimming caused by reading online. Again, alternative explanations are ignored: long before the internet, people have observed that they get more out of the text on a second reading. Then why should anyone be surprised that they missed something on a first reading?
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