Does reading on the net decrease the quality of reading?

Any other questions? Does reading content on the internet decrease the quality of our reading? Some studies show that skim reading makes people incapable of reading deeply or reading serious literature Answer Yes, certainly that's possible I would consider three broad factors One would be the intention of the reader the second is the distraction while reading and the third is the content of what is being read So with respect to the second the distraction while reading certainly the internet offers enormous amount of distractions even while we are reading something on a page usually there are so many links to other things and often in our phone or our computer so many other apps are also open and they give you notifications so the tendency to look for something more interesting and to avoid something demanding that can be enormously aggravated by the reading on the digital medium that's why it's quite possible that people will not read long articles and the on email it is said that please send short message keep the message short if you want people to read them also the very nature of the presence of as we can contrast this somebody reading in a book in a library where everybody else is reading that doesn't mean that people will be more studious and there could be greater reading with better reading with lesser distraction greater absorption most of the times when people are clicking on this and that on the phone we get affected by others also what they are doing so in terms of the potential for distraction undoubtedly digital reading makes us very very vulnerable to almost endless distractions now as far as the content of what is being read is concerned there is the content the internet actually gives us access to both the best of what humanity has produced and to the worst that humanity has produced so if we want to access classic literatures if we want to access what the best brains in the past or the present have produced are producing it is available much more easily than it was in the past so if we compare the content there are there is so much gossip so much obscenity so much malicious attacks so much outlaws but then there is also a wealth of serious content which may be informational like say Wikipedia which may be analytical on certain other websites which give not just news but analysis almost every subject that we need to learn on learn something about we can google and find some answers for it so this so in terms of content if we compare the classroom environment or the library environment or the study room at home environment for reading we could never have as much material in one place as we could have in online so now of course there are many who feel that the physical touch of a book the act of picking up a book, moving the pages all this contributes in a significant way to the experience of reading and all this is lost when we read digitally while this may be true but we can also consider that actually the books as we know them have also not been that widespread or not been that widespread that for that long in history the books were never widely available in the past people would mostly people would not even know the written language so most of the people would get their knowledge largely by hearing the oral tradition was much more widespread and vibrant than the written tradition and there is so in that sense changes in the past we had parchments but the number of people who would read these parchments or whatever way the books were written they were very very few books were rare and knowledge in the books was meant for elite number of people so we could say that books whose physical books whose lost we are lamenting they themselves are a few hundred years old and at least as extensively used as they are now so so whether we can say that the brain is geared in a particular way to function and the brain evolves in different ways so higher cognitive abilities require sustained focus and that requires focused reading that's true but I think this brings us to the but the change of the medium is of reading may not be that big a cause of concern or lamentation because even this medium on a widespread scale is just a few hundred years old and that brings us to the last point which is probably the most important the intent if somebody wants to do serious reading the internet can be a gold mine if somebody wants to be casual and cursory then if they want to fool around surfing this and surfing that the internet offers enormous avenue even for that so the real thing in my understanding is that rather than fighting the medium which is almost an impossible task in many ways the internet is like the jinn of Aladdin once the jinn has come out of the lamp or wherever, the jinn is not going to go inside again, the jinn is with us and the only thing we can do is put that jinn to the best possible use, similarly we can't do much about the fact that internet is there that has revolutionized people's way of reading now there are people who do serious research work using the internet and almost every serious research work researcher feels blessed by the internet and also feels burdened by the internet because there is always the chance that the nagging feeling that maybe I could do some more research so overall it depends rather than lamenting the loss of a particular medium we can focus on strengthening the intent of people if we can in whatever ways possible, even through the internet or whatever, if we can help people appreciate valuable books, then even if those books require sustained focus and they require the intellectual demanding if their wisdom can be made accessible by sharing the joys of reading, if that intention can be infused in people, then that I feel is the long term solution for dealing with the huge technocratic changes that are happening in the way we read in today's times, thank you.