Reading is fundamental

It's not just kids. I have worked in a government facility for 8 years where the median age is in the mid 50's. As one Branch Manager said of his staff in the context of moving some of their workflow off the mainframe and onto the web: "I'm lucky if they can *find* the submit button let alone click on it." I thought he was joking. 7 years ago.

And in a more frightening example I worked for a company that produced logistics software and web based fulfillment software for retail companies. In 2000 I was chastised for putting important business information in email rather than calling or writing(!) because 'email is a pretty new technology and a lot of people here aren't very comfortable with it yet.'

Someday, someone is going to write a really interesting dissertation on the different ways people scan websites and how to optimize them for the greatest variety of readers. I strongly suspect that this is the result of whole page "scanning" rather than close, word-by-word (or even sentence-by-sentence) "reading". Have you ever gotten sucked into a wikipedia linkalong? Think of how important it is to learn to scan for "kids these days".
Not that one shouldn't be aware of the difference between scanning and reading (if indeed that is what's going on). Just that they might be being honest.

I don't think it's just kids these days. I say this because I currently work for a defense contractor, and believe me; I get that story here from the operators on the floor as well as some of the engineers. It makes you wonder if they really are being straight with you, and I'm starting to lean towards them telling a white lie. Think about it, in their mind, they might be thinking that it's way easier to simply ask the person than to look for the information themselves. However, since they don't want to look lazy, they "claim" that they looked all over, when in fact they probably didn't. I've seen this from plenty of people that are older than me, so it doesn't appear to be generational. Of course, my anecdotes don't make data either... :-)

I think it's the two fundamental principles of human behavior being demonstrated:

1) People are Lazy

2) Thinking is Work

I think reading skills may not be entirely transferable between different forms of writing. People lean an awful lot on the conventions of the kind of writing they're reading, and novels, websites, computer documentation, etc all have very different conventions (even Microsoft, Apple, and Unix documentation differs pretty dramatically).

People skim because it's usually the right choice. You could read every word of everything you're supposed to read, but for most things, you hit some serious diminishing returns. The problem starts when people don't know when to stop skimming and start reading closely.

Maybe it's adults using strange constructions like "off of" that impart a false sense of redundancy... ;)

No offense, of course. And sadly, no solution other than that I seem to remember there are studies suggesting that text on the internet is read differently from printed text; maybe adjusting the presentation to that difference should be looked into.

Welcome to the "passive-aggressive" experience. They're not really interested in the subject generally and are just trying to offload as much of the eye-rolling boredom as possible until they've managed to wade across the unavoidable chasm of their obligations to finally get that piece of paper/project completed.

Welcome to geezer territory. When dealing with students in ways much like you've described, I crossed over at a similar point in my career. I think Darryl has properly diagnosed the problem - the students with which you a working are not much interested in tasks you assigned them to. Rather than spend their time "look[ing] 'all over' [y]our organization's website", it is so much easier to have you do it instead. This strategy has been working for them a long time so you'll have to devise ways to keep the problem in their court and refuse to play their game.

Several years ago, I coined the term "male pattern blindness" for the "inability" to see things that are not in the front row of the top three shelves of the refrigerator. Since then, I've had a few women confess that they too suffer, but it seems to be a mostly male thing. I think it may relate to an ability to "not see" clutter. It may be that the students think it's not there, but I'm inclined to think it's often laziness.

Thanks for the good and interesting post, and the last one (on copyright) as well.

Multi-tasking: younger generation think nothing of listening to music, watching TV, sitting in a noisy coffee shop, IMing to friends, talking on the cell phone, while trying to read things (internet and hard copy), and wonder why they can't retain or find information.

I also second the skimming theory - especially when there are multiple browser windows open, and distractions (ads, sidebars,extraneous visuals etc.) on most websites.

ADD - people (especially younger) have limited attention spans, which are reinforced by television and video games. Both my nephews are behind in their reading (despite being very, very bright kids) which I blame on their playing video games constantly from toddlerhood; i.e., they NEVER learned to just sit & read for more than a few minutes at a time.

I think Darryl is quite correct. Im an engineer, and I see this sort of thing all the time. Once upon a time (before I got older and more cynical) I, too, used to help solve their "problems". Then I wised up, and now get great mileage out of statements such as "look harder".