It's not a statement about life being better or worse than the 50s per se; that can be debated. But we're definitely in a far more "dystopian" state of affairs than we were in the 50s.
The culprit is probably work. Think of how much of the typical office job involves ingesting low-quality information at high speed. The jobs aren't mentally taxing, but they do burn you out from serious reading, because of all the time wasted on peoples' shitty emails. You basically need to become a skimmer to survive modern life, especially if you work an office job, and there's a nonzero amount of mental effort in code switching from serious reading to half-assed work email reading.
(Tongue in cheek, but not really)
Hmm, as an inexperienced youth I read - and believed - stuff that I now recognize as totally poisonous crap.
Putting someone else's thoughts in your brain should be better regulated. There used to be censorship, abolishing it was probably a bad idea. Yes, I know how we've been conditioned about that. Sort of proves my point.
Sometimes you have to read crap in order to realize it's crap.
Fortunately, over time, it seems that we develop a certain "smell" for books. I am very picky about what I read nowdays, and my "hunch" for good books seem to be mostly accurate.
Certainly there are truths behind that, but I think we need to realize that videos and even video games can be informative, uplifting, moving, etc, just like books. And conversely books can be a huge waste of time.
I think it’s that reading uses your imagination much more. It creates a whole world.
YouTube just feels frustratingly slow and boxed in to me relative to reading.