I don't think this is the same phenomena the article was talking about. It is not that online readers lack the ability/patience to read long pointless text-wall

I don't think this is the same phenomena the article was talking about. It is not that online readers lack the ability/patience to read long pointless text-walls. It is that they seem unable to grok longer, come complex texts. As a programmer, I have been reading online my whole adult life, and probably spend online much more than the average (but "civilians" seem to be catching up, fast). I do not feel I am particularly affected by this effects, but I (and I suspect you as well) have do deal on a daily basis with complex, artificial, information dense constructions all the time. Contrast that with the mindless stream of tweets, likes and lolcats that fall on the typical user every day. Also, I as well as you read fiction but online and in paper. It's hard to measure but I'd say at least a million words per year. This quantity is not typical at all. On the other hand, even amateur fanfiction is authored with an audience in mind and goes to at least an order of magnitude more composition and editing than whatever piece of crap we send/recv over the privacy of out SMS on a daily basis. So yes, I think you are pretty well protected from the debilitating symptoms of these new disease (if you allow me to call it that way).