IG and TikTok videos often have captions to read so they can be watched without sound, so they're not inherently a counter to my point. But yes, it's just another "boob tube". It's not good, but it's certainly not any worse than watching tv nonstop, which is where we were in the 90s and aughts. And kids are on Discord and in text chains constantly, whereas during the pre-internet 20th century, most people called people to communicate long-distance; letters were certainly not a daily thing.

We're about 70 years too late to stop visual media supplanting text as the main form of entertainment media, but at least the internet has brought text back in lots of ways that just didn't exist previously (especially forums and messaging).

I remember when Harry Potter and Twilight both made headlines for both getting adults "reading again" (because they already were mostly not), but then also a bunch of people jumping in and deriding them as trash, insisting that they need to read 'real' books, and there's a bouquet of that in a lot of the discussion of social media.

If we take away IG and TikTok and smartphones, kids aren't going to go read, they're just going to watch TV.