Has Reading Become Obsolete?

I want to get back to reading about things. I am finding more and more that when I look something up online it usually includes a video. I don't want to watch a video. I want to read something. As a person with a lot of education and a former teacher, college professor and now as a literacy tutor, I observe a lot relative to education and how we as citizens of a constitutional republic obtain information. It is imperative that we keep our focus on literacy if we are to be able to keep our republic. I am convinced of that. Every citizen of the United States should be able to read the Constitution, for example. The government of a free people requires that its citizens be adequately informed, and I don't believe that is happening at the present time. I am a person with a wide range of interests, so I don't approach this topic as an expert. I am interested in too many different things to be an expert at any one thing. I do love to read about history, especially American history, and that includes trying to keep up with politics and current events. There are a lot of news outlets online, and I confess they are making me a worse reader than I've ever been. I did work on music all day today, and yesterday was a church day, so that's kind of my excuse for getting zero reading done yesterday or today, but as a general pattern, I see that having a smart phone and even having an antenna TV have not really helped me learn more by reading. I first became aware of this problem when I read "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" by Neil Postman. It came out in 1985. I don't remember exactly when I read it, but in it I learned how technology began to erode our intellect and, more broadly, our culture and the global community, if that's what you want to call it--our crazy world, in other words. I come at this not as a scholar, not as an expert, but only as a citizen and as someone who works in education. I recommend this book to anyone interested in this topic, but this is not a book review by any means. It is, after all, just a "web log," or "blog." I'm just reflecting in print. What stands out to me the most about Postman's book is the fact that the media has brought to the forefront images, and, for all practical purposes, removed print technology to the background. Where books, newspapers and magazines used to be the main source of information for people who wanted to learn something, now they can just watch a documentary or a video or whatever other brilliant modern form these sources have evolved into. The result of this is technological advancement is that the quest for information now leads to what most would agreed is impossible to distinguish from entertainment. As entertainment, it has been more and more difficult to tell the difference between fact and fiction, between fantasy and reality, between what is genuine and what is fake. Today we talk about "disinformation" and "misinformation," "conspiracy theories," "political correctness" and the like. We have all seen the decline in civility across the board, in the media. I noticed it when the newspapers first started inviting reader comments, and when television shows like Jerry Springer opened up a veritable Pandora's Box of dysfunction in our society. Now that is practically all we see anymore when we look for news. And as for education, I am sorry if someone reading this is mad about "graphic novels," but I challenge anyone to explain to me the difference between them and plain old comic books. And why are more fifth and sixth graders reading Garfield during silent reading time rather than something that might help him or her become a better person, a better citizen, something that might challenge their mind? I have nothing against Garfield, and if "graphic novels" help children somehow, I'm all for that too. I am just saying I am not convinced. I understand that putting weighty topics into a simpler form may help break a subject down so we don't have to spend as much time digging into every topic. It just seems to me that we have made it so that nobody likes to read anymore, and I am concerned about that. I am just not convinced that 24/7 entertainment is the best way to occupy ourselves if we want to be an informed citizenry and if we want to be a civil society. Everyone is entitled to have an opinion, or at least that's what I remember learning growing up in school in past decades. Now everything has to be entertainment and a topic for argument or hateful comments on social media. I would like to see more intellectual curiosity, more interest in pursuing topics that affect our daily lives, such as economics, financial literacy, and, yes, communication and political science. Even when I went to college in the 60s, everything was pretty specialized, so that maybe we couldn't be as well-rounded as we could have been, but at least Western Civilization was required, and students didn't evaluate their professors. Today, I think we can all agree that the university has certainly not been the boon to society that it was presented to be a few decades in the past. Today it seems like a place to learn how to be an activist and how to have "mostly peaceful" demonstrations. I've said about as much as I wanted to say for today. Maybe I’ve said too much. I just think we can bring reading back into focus so that it is not a chore our children hate to do and our grownups don't model it either. I am not sure what the answer is. I am sure it is not AI, but don’t get me started. It’s too late.