Is internet making us stupid?

There seems to be reason to be worried concerning the issue of what the net does to our brains, our ways to handle information, our ability to focus on the systemic complexity of our realities. Being online means, mainly, being in relation to short texts, short video clips, pictures. Many of us, like myself, find it difficult to concentrate on long complex narratives etc. Think about it, when was the last time you heard someone tell that s/he had been absorbed into the texts of Dostoyevski or Tolstoi. We just do it any more, (practially) nobody reads long complex narratives with a variety of protagonists and anagonists involved.

Is it so that our culture, our media, and our net do their best to make us stupid? Obviously there is something we need to consider and do. By this I don't mean not being in the net. Such an idea would be naive and irrational. What we need to thing about is how to be in the net in a way that helps develop ability to complex thinking, to understand the systemic nature of - well - systems we are immersed into, to be able to deal with unavoidable complexities and paradoxes in human life.

My idea is not to draft the solutions, just one approach here. Internet is by its nature short-termist. This means that everything we do there takes usually only a short time. Then we do something else etc. What might help are ways to slow down the natural speed from one issue to another topic. One way to do this could be through tempting ways to serve novels, short and long, through internet. Thereby Kindle may be one relevant way to approach this issue.

P.S.
According to Kidd & Castano reading literature seems to have relevant influence. For example literature in the 16th century seems to have boosted humanitarian revolutions like anti-slavery and anti-torture movements. Readers were able to emphasize with people in different situations through reading. An important question arises concerning how the prevailing practice of no-longer-reading-anything-longer-than-what-can-be-seen-on-screen influences us.

Sources:
Carr, N. (2008). Is google making us stupid? The Atlantic. July/August.
Kidd, D.C. & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science.