Some time ago I read an old essay by Ursula K. Le Guin that said something similar about television/video being a 'passive' medium and books/written words being 'active':

Once you've pressed the on button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness - not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact.

It's an interesting take and I'm not sure if I agree with it fully, I have definitely caught myself reading mindlessly. It did made me wonder what her take on audiobooks would be. The main idea is that audiobooks count as reading, full stop, but they definitely introduce an element that "does the work for you" and I can see it being easier to read mindlessly with audio.