Has the decline in reading lead to more black and white thinking?

Hey all so I've been a reader pretty much my entire life. I started with horror like Goosebumps and Stephen King and then discovered Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe then worked upwards from there. I'm a 26 y.o. guy and I notice that there is a lot of black and white thinking coming from both my generation, gen alpha, and millennials. They don't want to examine their beliefs and you are either an oppressor or oppressed with no middle ground. They are also highly content to stay in their echo chambers and never leave in order to question their views or learn about other people's perspectives. Reading Virginia Woolf for example helped me look at the women in my life in a way I never really did before hand. A lot of my ideas also come from Leo Tolstoy and Victor Hugo who are incredibly empathetic writers.

There is a common thread I've noticed in the sense that readership has declined. While Neil Gaiman is in hot water at the moment, even he drew a connection between a lack of literacy and increased crime rates for example. It goes to show how important literature is Imo. Could the lack of empathy and black and white thinking in society today be partially explained by a lack of readership?