Reading and writing is still important

I saw an article another day that stated that there was elite college students that couldn't read books, that's concerned me.

For a long time reading was the primary source of knowledge humans had. And there is a reason to it. Us, as humans, had a hard time sharing expertise to other generations. But, afterwards, reading and writing made people thoughts become, in some sense, everlasting. And, as long as someone can read, you could die, but your ideas will never.
Thus, this source of information made men capable of creating functional societies, organizations, religions and countries. In fact, writing made every legislation of countries still today. That make us reflect: "With all technology, AI, and new ways of passing out information, is it reading still important? And if it is, why it's happening a decline in active readers word-wide?". There is no absolute truth when it comes to that question. Let's delve deeper into the question.

Why people nowadays are stopping to read? It's not because reading became less necessary or useful. But because organizations and governments, I don't know if it's on purpose, are creating a generations of weak minded individuals through creating a vicious environments(I am not saying that it's bad, but create weak people that have the wrong motivations). Now more than ever, most companies are trying everything that they possible can to make money out of their customers(and that's not wrong, that's how it works for a long time), but not everything that it's lucrative is good for the future of society. The internet, social media and other resources of information made pleasure easy and instantaneous within a few clicks. That made people get used to fast information and quick access to pleasure, and I strongly think that when you get comfortable doing the minimum, that's exactly what you will do forever.

Maybe people are not wrong, if there is shortcuts, why would I go to the hard way? Well, maybe because the hard way is what makes the difference from the mediocre to the genius. And genius, or talented people is what makes society advance. But that's another topic.

So, "why is reading is important for me?", I don't know if I have a direct response to that. In my case, I like to read, I feel like it's important to my development and to my mind, and also think that most people in any domain will get a lot of good things reading.
Maybe, a couple years from now everybody will plug their brain with a microcomputer and download everything they want with one click(I hope I am not around if this happens). But till that, reading is still important.
Check my twitter: https://x.com/samvanderhagen