clipped from halfanhour.blogspot.com

> So we tend to skim and read superficially, not thoughtfully.

There is no evidence of this. Indeed, the emergence of 'fisking' suggests a phenomenon quite the opposite. It was rare in the lump-publishing world to see a point-by-point refutation of an argument. In the online world, this is common. And the whole phenomenon of 'fact checking your ass' was an almost unknown talent in pre-internet days, an era when writers and politicians routinely got away with howlers.

What people need to recognize is that we've learned, in the electronic age, to process content - and especially textual content - at different speeds. We skim when we're searching - here we are looking for keywords, patterns, telling points, whatever. When we hit something important we slow down, and take in the content. When we hit the point where we want to engage, we take the content apart, considering it line by line, point by point.