Are young people losing the ability to read properly? Actually, I heartily wish they were since I might then have got a decent desk today at the British Library, which becomes overrun with undergraduates during the university holidays. But what about young people in general who are Facebooking and Tindering all day and can't concentrate on anything more than a soundbite? This alleged ADHD generation, as well as its elders who have been sucked in to the internet lifestyle, may be responsible for the human species losing its "deep-reading brain". At least that is the worry expressed by a group of writers and neuroscientists calling themselves the Slow Reading Movement.

In our culture of excitable neuroscientism a lot of such arguments employ the sexy word "brain" and so sound scientifically objective, but they are really socio-cultural arguments. No doubt there are many kinds of task-specific neural developments (ie "brain" types) that have been lost in the mists of evolutionary time, and whose absence we have no reason to regret. Not many people in advanced industrial societies today, for example, grow up developing the mental skills required to kill tasty large mammals with a well-hurled spear. But we don't read hand-wringing stories about how we have lost the antelope-hunting brain. So there needs to be a further demonstration that the "deep-reading brain" is something worth valuing. And this is never going to be a (neuro)scientific argument; it's a cultural argument.

The internet can be distracting … and skimming is tempting. Photograph: Getty

As it happens, I value deep reading – and so, perhaps, do you. And so, quite obviously, do all the youngish people I see everyday on London transport reading 700-page printed books such as the Game of Thrones series, 50 Shades of Grey or the new Donna Tartt. Stuart Jeffries has written persuasively about the popularity of such doorstops, as well as complex modern TV series. This might be a culture not of attention deficit but of "a wealth of attention focused more readily on the things that warrant it".

Of course the internet can be distracting – you're reading this, after all. It's true that skimming is tempting, that being overwhelmed with information is in some quarters worn perversely as a badge of pride; and that the request to express the "take-away" (or, as some say, the "tl;dr") of a lengthy piece of writing bespeaks a philistine data-age instrumentalism, according to which the only possible function of writing is to transmit bite-sized facts. And the new wave of speed-reading apps such as Spritz won't help, since it is well established that the faster you read the less you retain about whatever the hell it was that just flashed by.

Sales of YA fiction are booming. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

And yet the assumption in such doomy pronouncements that we might all be slaves to skimming and thus be allowing our brains to atrophy sounds fantastically condescending, just as it did when expressed in Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows. This kind of paternalistic fatalism seems ably refuted by sales of Young Adult blockbusters, as well as by researchers who bother to find out what young people actually do.

According to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital, for example, a teenager's "news-gathering process" alternated skimming or "grazing" with a "deep dive" when she found something she could really get her teeth into.

And such nutritious, dense, lengthy pieces of writing are, of course, becoming ever more popular on the very same internet that pessimists blame for destroying our attention spans. More and more online magazine startups are devoted to in-depth reportage or cheerfully non-topical discussions of ideas over many thousands of beautifully typeset words. Ideal, you might even say, for slow reading.

For me, the only fly in the ointment is my insuperable allergy to the kitschy, infantilising generic term for such pieces, "long reads". (We don't call albums "long listens" or epic dinners "long eats".) The alternative, "longform", is simply oxymoronic – sheer length is not a form. What was wrong with "essays" again? Presumably the old-school littérateurs of the Slow Reading Movement could approve of that one.