I take all your points, but still hold firm on mine.
I am not saying social media has killed the Literature Star (at least, I don't think I am, I am not actually completely sure what that is). And although I agree that people have always read at different gears, and that people have always skim read, I still think the shear amount of text that is available on the internet makes the whole thing an utterly different ball game. When you read a newspaper in the old days, sure, there were other articles that would grab away your attention, but there weren't million of these articles, popping up all over the page, from different sources, different writers, different topics. Any topic. There were only a certain amount of adverts in the pages, and only a certain amount of articles in a paper. This is very different.
Also, I don't think we should necessarily deride this new form of reading. For myself, when wanting to read about a heated topic such as Gaza or Ukraine, I like to jump between US news sites, to Russian ones, to European, (or Arabic / Israeli as the case may be ...). I don't read every article completely, but I like to get the tone from each so i feel I have as rounded and well informed position as possible. When I wrote about this new kind of reading, I wasn't deriding people who only read tweets.
I'm not saying people can't still read literature well, I am just saying that it is a different exercise for our minds, and it takes more and more time to adjust, the more we partake in the skim reading.
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Originally Posted by latepaul
This.
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This.
Social media has changed how we write. It would be ridiculous to suggest it hasn't changed how we read.