This is the subject of Nicholas Carr's _The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains_. In a nutshell, he argues that our brain gets better at things

This is the subject of Nicholas Carr's _The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains_. In a nutshell, he argues that our brain gets better at things that we do a lot, and worse at things we used to do a lot but now do a lot less. Reading is not different from any other activity in that sense. And many people nowadays don't read many long, hard books anymore, and instead quickly skim short articles and then switch to the next. So we get better at quickly getting bits of information from short articles, and worse at staying focused for an hour on the same demanding text. I find it hard to argue with.