Like.... little worms will be transmitted directly through the screen, and a bad smell will start pouring out your ears?
Give us a break.
Visual storytelling is fundamentally different from pure linguistic storytelling. It has much higher bandwidth, so it provides a richer set of simultaneous messages (in some ways similar to an opera or stage play or puppet show, but with even more flexibility over the visual content), but also causes a forced progression through time that makes it not as easily amenable to skimming, reading out of order, re-reading, cross-referencing, or pausing to write direct responses to the text.
But there’s a huge amount to learn and appreciate in visual stories. The best visual stories are incomparably better than the worst written schlock, and vice versa.
If you do some searching, you'll find lots of ink spilled on the subject of "does TV rot your brain" and the cognitive benefits of reading.
"you can just sit back and watch everything unfold without effort on your part. You’re less likely to pause to reflect on what’s happening."
does not apply to the considerable number of filmmakers (and occasional television content producers) who employ Brechtian alienation techniques.
eg. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
To use computers as an analogy. If you were to examine it only physically, a hard drive filled with random garbage would look the same as one filled with our greatest works.
I cannot agree with that at all. A great deal of cinema is heavy enough on information to be educational. Think about how much you can learn about history, literature, economics, or politics from watching Jean-Luc Godard’s output from 1962-1968. Even if the medium has flaws in the depth of its presentation, its compilation of citations to important literature that can then be followed up, can be invaluable.
And aren't plays reading? And do they really lose the goodness they have as "reading" when they move from the written page to a performance that just happens to be captured on film instead of before a live audience?