It’s also my experience that readers are willing to read longer, more sustained pieces online — despite all the how-to-blog guides that tell you to keep things brief and punchy — but how the narrative is presented might be a factor. Long blocky paragraphs that work in print might have a different visual impact onscreen, so that a writer might pay almost as much attention to the arrangement of white space as he or she does to the language. Fiction specifically written for the web could take on a very different ‘look’ than fiction written for print.

I don’t worry about the future of reading and readers; I don’t fear that our increasingly networked, wired, online existence is giving us all ADD. I do wonder how these changes in technology will affect the shape of literary fiction: if it will be more streamlined, possibly more plot-oriented to engage and compel the reader’s increasingly valuable attention, if and how it will interact with elements such as video, etc., as popular fiction is sure to do.

Personally, I doubt that the human capacity for storytelling (and storyneeding) can be compromised: but its nature can be changed.