People think that we're reading less well online. That may be true, but not for the reason they suggest

There's a meme going round that I think we need to stamp on, quick, because I know you won't give this piece much of your time. The reason for that is not because the internet is making you stupid, but because this piece will only appear on screens (unless you print it out onto paper, you environmental villain).

The idea that "the internet is making me stupid" has gained some traction in recent weeks. Nick Carr kicked it off with an article in The Atlantic magazine called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in which, contrary to longstanding requirements of headlines that ask questions, the answer was not "No, next!" but "Perhaps, yes".

His line — roughly — is that access to all this information, and the tendency to leap around as we consume information in little chunks, means that we're becoming unfamiliar with mastering long, complex arguments, and give up reading after a few screens of HTML.

Others chimed in, saying that they, too, found it hard to concentrate on things.

Well, sure, we have a lot more distractions these days. There's always the computer, and your mobile, so a tweet or a quick check on your Scrabulous game on Facebook is never far away. We're easily distracted, though I suspect that's just part of how we're built as humans. Nobody criticises birds for being prone to fly away when we approach them; it's a defense mechanism against predators. Humans, too, will flit around, given the chance, just in case we find something that's fabulously useful to us.

But I think the root cause of all this handwringing is much closer to home than Google. It's the screens. Reading on a screen is tiring. You read slower on a screen. Add in a non-optimal font (sans serif, without the little marks you find at the ends of letters, works best on screen because it's easier for the computer to draw) and you have a recipe for slow reading.

It's interesting to go back and see what Jakob Nielsen, the usability expert, was saying about this 10 years ago: "Low-resolution monitors (including all computer screens until now) have poor readability: people read about 25% slower from computer screens than from printed paper. Experimental 300dpi displays (costing $30,000) have been measured to have the same reading speed as print, so we will get better screens in the future. People will simply not read long texts at a reduced reading speed, so unless they have much better screens, electronic books will have a problem."

He added: "Even when e-books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

"The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates."

(Interestingly, he said the two ideas that would work were print-on-demand, and downloadable audio. Have you subscribed to Tech Weekly?)

So this 25% slower figure: is it true? Yes. Other studies bear it out: this one in 1998 found that higher-resolution screens mean you read more accurately, though still not as fast as print; another more recent one at Manchester University (PDF or Google HTML cache) found reading on paper 10-30% faster.

There's another thing about paper. You're not tempted to go and check your email. I find I can read 5,000-word pieces in the New Yorker magazine (one of the last refuges of really long, well-written pieces, along with the London Review of Books) as long as they're on paper. On screen, I haven't a hope: they're about 10 screens long, and one does simply get tired of having to click through while retaining everything you've read. And there's always the distraction of following a link that you won't have in print.

Computer screens, meanwhile, are still a long way from mimicking the quality — in terms of dots per inch — of paper. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror did an interesting comparison at the end of 2006 to show how far we haven't come, comparing commercial printing (about 2,400 dots per inch, or dpi) with a good, cheap printer will give you between 600 and 1,200dpi.

A typical computer display, by contrast, is between 72 and 100dpi (in some cases up to 150dpi — though often the screen is then very small, so the letters of words become hard to read. (There are other differences, which is that the screen has luminance, where the paper reflects light. This, as you already know, is why you can read a computer screen at night.) Atwood's conclusion: "We have a long, long way to go before computer displays can get anywhere near printer resolutions."

The only niggling question I have is whether anyone has investigated reading speeds for the Amazon Kindle, which has low luminance and a 167dpi screen. That's good, but it's still a long, long way from paper. (I can't find any studies about reading speeds on it; perhaps it's too early.)

OK, you've read to the end. You know now that the internet isn't making us stupid; it's just making us read slower. Go on, go and check your email. You've earned it.