Reading avoidance?

Are people reading less deeply and just skimming? Loren Dempsey suggests a new problem with information gathering, perhaps influenced by soundbites, snippets, twitter, and other short-but-sweet ways of information input, resulting in people just glossing over material and looking for highlights:

The network style of consumption -- particularly mobile consumption -- calls forward services which atomize content, providing snippets, thumbnails, ringtones, abstracts, tags, ratings and feeds. All of these create a variety of hooks and hints for people for whom attention is scarce. It has even been recently suggested that this pattern of consumption is rewiring our cognitive capacities (Carr, 2008). Regardless of the longer term implications, it is clear that people need better clues about where to spend their attention in this environment, and that this is one incentive for the popularity of social approaches. This attention scarcity is apparent also in the academic environment where a bouncing and skimming style of consumption has been observed (Nicholas, et al., 2006). Palmer, et al. (2007) talk about actual 'reading avoidance'. Researchers may survey more material, but spend less time with each item, relying on abstracts and other content clues to avoid reading in full.


"Other content clues" - could be indexing, and could be a selling point.