I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online offers insights for writers on the web and about reading there.
Common Core’s study says:
The percentage of 17- year-olds who report reading for fun daily declined from one in three in 1984 to one in five in 2004. In 2006, 15- to 24-year olds on the whole reported reading an average of seven minutes a day on weekdays and 10 minutes a day on weekends.7 Meanwhile, in the past decade, the amount of time that teens and preteens devote to television, video games, and computers has increased steadily.
And again I ask, why is reading online not reading? Perhaps Lazy Eyes has a hint of the reasons, including short paragraphs, half the length of conventional writing, and loads more bullet points.